media update’s Adam Wakefield spoke to Nick Krige, head of newsroom operations at TEAMtalk media, part of the MobiMedia group, about the importance of original content and moving beyond standard angles for stories.
MobiMedia has a number of titles in the sports sector. What is unique about the sports content market when looking at post regularity, team brand influence on traffic, and the different types of content you publish?For a long time, MobiMedia's focus was creating content for our own platforms and syndicating to multiple clients who may not be able to afford to have an entire newsroom of their own.
Unfortunately, that model is dying as unique content is becoming more and more important for search engine optimisation and recognition. This has seen our focus shift back to aggressively growing our own platforms and driving revenue through ad sales and other unique functions such as offering tokens to enter competitions and play games on our sites.
In terms of post frequency, we create a ton of content every day. We still have many syndication partners and serve them every relevant story from around the sporting world. The major sports we cover are football, cricket, rugby and motorsport, while also covering less mainstream sports for clients who require them.
News surrounding major sporting teams has been, and probably always will be, incredibly important for driving traffic to our and our clients' platforms. Big teams and players draw big numbers, on the field and off.
We also have a hard news team that covers political, business, crime, entertainment and lifestyle news – primarily focused on South Africa, but also on news related to the African continent and major international news – for our
SA Breaking News website, which recently received a
Bronze award at the 2018
Bookmark Awards.
How does MobiMedia leverage analytics and insights for content decisions?
They play a massive role. Analytics and insights help us see and understand the type of content our audiences enjoy reading and engaging with across all of our platforms, from web and social media all the way through to SMS messages and USSD.
This is extrapolated into the kinds of content we create for our clients because both the content creation and content syndication businesses are driven by results and engagement.
How does MobiMedia use social media to engage with readers? Is there anything unique about engaging with sports fans on social media?Social media is incredibly important for engaging with our audiences. It provides a very unique platform to talk directly to and with them, so we can get feedback very quickly on things we are doing well and things we perhaps are not doing so well.
It does come with a lot of risk though. As we are all aware, the Internet presents a whole host of dangers to those who aren't careful. We especially have to be mindful of this when engaging with fans on behalf of our clients as we need to make sure both their and our own standards and integrity are upheld.
What, in your opinion, makes for a good quality piece of sports content? That depends on what platform or client the piece of content is being written for. On a personal note, I try to help steer my writers to tackling a topic with an angle that hasn't been covered yet.
To use an arbitrary example, if Jose Mourinho were to have a public spat with Arsene Wenger, the quotes and fight would be reported far and wide all over the world. We would obviously cover the story, but that doesn't mean we have to do it the same way.
You can always dig deeper into the relationship between the two men: look at arguments they've had before, both with each other and with other managers; at the performance and form of each team; and at other factors that might have caused the outburst.
The important point to all of this is to create content that our audience actually wants to read and share with friends and family. We’re writing for them and not ourselves, after all. This is another area where analytics plays a huge role because it allows us to see what kinds of content specific audiences react to and want to read.
For more information, visit
www.mobimedia.co.za. You can also follow MobiMedia on
Twitter.
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