Audience engagement is vital to succeeding in today’s online world. Your website competes against dozens of streaming services, social media platforms, email, etc. The art and science of keeping your audience engaged is crucial to reach your growth goals.

What Is Audience Engagement?

Successful audience engagement happens when people interact with your website and live experiences for prolonged periods. Instead of bouncing away in a few seconds, a highly engaged audience member looks forward to visiting your website and online experiences.

Audience engagement matters for brands and publishers for a few reasons. First, a highly engaged audience is more likely to give you first-party data, fueling high ROI personalized marketing campaigns. Second, audience engagement stretches your marketing budget further because your audience will likely share your content.

Knowing what audience engagement means is just the starting point. You also need practical steps and tools to bring audience engagement to life. Use the growth tactics in the rest of this guide to grow your audience and keep them coming back.

1. Make A Positive First Impression Quickly

First impressions count a great deal in online experiences. Research shows that the average attention span is down to 47 seconds as of 2023. That’s a sharp decline from 2004, when it was 150 seconds, according to research reported by CNN.

To keep things simple, look for negative factors and positive factors. Negative factors are barriers or distractions that make engagement less likely to stick. Positive factors encourage audience engagement.

Negative factors

• Slow website speed. The overall speed of your website matters. Slower websites are likely penalized in search engines, making your audience less likely to find you.
• Unclear call to action. Overwhelming your audience with too many options will deter some people from engaging with you. Aside from the homepage and navigation elements, ask yourself if each significant page is focused.
• Disruptive notifications. Some websites partly or entirely obscure the user’s experience to display notifications (e.g., privacy notifications). While important, excessive notifications make it difficult for your audience to focus on what matters most: your content!

Positive factors

• Engaging content. Regularly publishing relevant content to your audience is one of the best ways to draw your audience to your website in the first place.
• User-generated content opportunities. Give your audience a way to share their thoughts and react to your website (e.g., reviews, votes, and polls).
• Social proof elements. Engagement is more likely to happen when people see others have already engaged with your website. Highlight the best comments, user contributions, and more to send social proof signals to website visitors.
• Visual content. Look for ways to include visual content like photos, infographics, and videos.

Your user experience (UX), technology, and marketing teams all have a role in making a positive first impression on your audience.

2. Provide Relevant Content For Your Audience’s Changing Needs 

Relevant content is so vital to driving engagement that it needs to be explored further. There are several ways you can drive engagement by increasing relevance. Use the following prompts to look for ways to connect your content with your audience.

Relevance to external events and factors 

Sharing content relevant to current events is a top concern for publishers. Yet, it also matters for brands. Here are a few tactics to ensure your website is relevant to what’s happening in the world.

• Calendar relevance. The calendar influences what we’re talking about and thinking about. Start by looking at the calendar to align your website with major holidays and seasons of the year (e.g., back to school, the December holidays, etc.). 
• Competitor relevance. Your competitors should not dictate your strategy. However, if a close competitor makes a significant mistake or launches a new product, your content may want to consider that fact.
• Economic relevance. The broader economic landscape shapes what people think and worry about. For example, emphasizing value and savings opportunities may appeal more to your audience in an economic downturn.

First-party data

The secret to unlocking relevance lies in first-party data – insights you gather directly from your website audience. This data is far more valuable externally gathering information because it shows what your audience values from you. 

Optimize your audience engagement with first-party data in the following ways.

• Do more of what’s working. Are you seeing a significant spike in engagement for a specific type of content? Take that signal seriously and explore that theme further in future content and experiences.
• Create micro content for your audience. Your content doesn’t need to be relevant to everybody in your audience every time. Sometimes, it is better to create content designed to address the specific needs of certain audience segments (e.g., your “VIP” audience members who are most likely to make a purchase).

3. Add User-Friendly Engagement Tools To Your Website

Increasing audience engagement with the right technology is one of the best ways to lift engagement fast. The following tools can help you to lift engagement quickly.

Arena Live Chat

Live chat makes it easy for your audience to send messages to each other, ask questions, vote in polls and more. You can install Arena live chat in minutes, which makes it one of the fastest ways to increase audience engagement.

Arena Live Blog

Covering a breaking news story like a sports championship or election is a powerful way to attract your audience. Arena live blog makes it to draft, edit and publish rapid-fire updates for your audience. When your audience knows they can get quick updates on rapidly changing news stories, they will keep coming back for more.

Video streaming

Live video experiences are an important way to draw in your audience and keep them engaged. For example, live shopping experiences where influencers and others show off products have been proven to drive significant revenue. Selling products isn’t the only way to use live video, either.

Adding video streaming to your website is easy when you use the right tools. For additional tips, see our post: How to stream video with Vimeo OTT In 7 Steps.

You can also use live video to share insights with your audience and gather feedback. Ensure you also have a live chat so your audience can quickly share their thoughts and reactions.

4. Give Your Audience Multiple Ways To Engage 

Your audience has people with different energy levels, interests, and focus regarding your content and brand. Some super fans will create content about your products, like influencers who create unboxing videos. Much of your audience is different: they’re interested in you but may also have other pressing concerns.

Giving multiple engagement opportunities is one way to unlock more engagement from your audience. It’s best to start with simple and easy engagement options since those will apply to many people in your audience.

Live Chat

Coming together to interact with other people in online chat was one of the first social experiences on the Internet. It’s still one of the best ways to interact online today. With Arena Live Chat, you can host a live chat session directly on your website. Setting up a live chat experience takes just a few minutes.

To kickstart the live chat experience, it’s best to have one or two moderators to encourage discussions and take action as needed on inappropriate content.

Social reactions

Make it easy for your audience to like or react to your content. Beyond the usual suspects of social reactions (e.g., like, heart, etc.), go a step further. Look at the different options available on Emojipedia. 

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Arena live chat supports emojis and lets users create an avatar (i.e., upload an image linked to their profile).

Polls

When your audience is attending an online event, a poll is one of the simplest ways to spark engagement. In essence, you ask a simple question and allow your audience to vote by choosing an option.

Posting a poll within the first 5-10 minutes of starting an online event is a best practice to keep your audience engaged immediately. Posting more than 2-3 polls over the course of an hour might feel overwhelming, so don’t overuse this engagement tactic.

Question & answer

Giving your audience the ability to ask questions is a powerful way to boost engagement. To see just how powerful question-focused events are, look at Reddit. The social platform often hosts wildly popular “AMA” (ask me anything) with celebrities, authors, politicians, and others.

Be aware that there is a risk of inappropriate content with Q&A (and audience engagement efforts generally). Our final tactic – moderation – will equip you to manage this risk.

Product reviews

Make it easy for your audience to write reviews of your products on your website. Your review activity will only improve if your website forces users to take fewer steps before adding a review. When you see a particularly significant review, go the extra mile and reach out to the reviewer to thank them. If the person has a complaint, reaching out is still worthwhile.

5. Use Exclusivity To Draw Audience Engagement

Offering exclusive experiences to your audience is an age-old tactic to attract attention. It’s one of the reasons that conferences and tradeshows remain so popular. Only so many people will invest the time and money to attend such an event.

With online engagement, there are several ways to leverage exclusivity to lift engagement. If you invite an influencer or celebrity to your niche, you don’t need to go to Hollywood to find someone. Simply look for someone who recently won awards or has a large social media following.

• Time-limited event. The first way to signal exclusivity is to make your experience time limited. For example, schedule a one-time 60-minute online chat experience. 
• Limited registration. While technology tools can support many attendees, it is sometimes helpful to go small. Limiting attendance to 25-50 people is an intelligent way to add a more intimate quality to the event.
• Early access for registered users. Finally, give registered users on your website the first opportunity to register for the event. Giving users advance access is a great way to reinforce the value of registration.

6. Find Breaking News Opportunities To Spark Audience Engagement

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This tactic is suited to publishers and news organizations. You can boost audience engagement. For example, think about sports events like March Madness. Elections, court trials, and essential company news (e.g., an Apple or Facebook conference) all represent other breaking news opportunities.

To leverage these opportunities, get ready with the following tips.

• People. Put together a list of people who will contribute to your live blog coverage. A combination of in-house staff and freelancers is often helpful.
• Tools. Use Arena Live Blog so that your contributors and editors can easily submit updates and get them posted directly to your website. 
• Process. Give guidance to your staff on how you will approach breaking news. For example, you may want to streamline your fact-checking and editorial process to a degree.

7. Use Moderation To Keep Engagement Brand Safe

Opening your virtual doors to your audience is a wonderful way to lift audience engagement. That said, it does carry some risks. Remember when people “Zoom bombed” online events with offensive content? Offensive language, off-topic comments, and more are all possible when you bring people together online.

Moderation is a crucial way to solve the inappropriate content challenge. Arena gives you several tools to moderate audience engagement experiences effectively.

Automated moderation

Arena live chat has automated moderation features like a profanity filter. This capability means that you can prevent most offensive language from making it into your chat session. 

Manual moderation

For an added level of assurance, manual moderation is a great choice. Manually screening questions during Q&A sessions with important guests is often wise. Without moderation, the discussion may wander from the primary topic.

Discover How Arena Can Grow Your Engagement

Adding Arena to your website is one of the fastest ways to increase engagement. You can break free from social media platforms like Facebook, Slack and Instagram and build a community right on your website. Learn more about how Arena can help you grow audience engagement.

Attracting a user to your website for the first time is a big win! Yet, that’s just the start of the journey. Transforming that passing visitor into an engaged, loyal fan is far more crucial for the growth and health of your brand. 

Why Focusing On “Website Visitors” Might Hurt Your Growth 

The standard term for a person coming to your website is a website visitor. That simple description is helpful in the context of analytics. There’s a hidden danger to using that type of language: it may encourage viewing your audience in passive terms.

Instead of thinking of people who come to your website as visitors or passive audience members, it’s vital to stress the value of engagement. Emphasizing engagement is vital because of the hectic, distracted digital world we all live in.

The average American checks their phone once every three minutes. Also, many people have an average of 10-20 web browser tabs open at any given time. That’s the reality – and challenge – we face when it comes to getting our audience’s attention and building online communities.

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The way forward is to evolve how people interact with your website. Give your audience more opportunities to interact with you, other people and personalize the experience. In brief, you need to make your website an exciting place people look forward to using.

The True Value of User-Generated Content Engagement

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Social media platforms are successful for many reasons, including emphasizing user-generated content. By allowing people to create profiles, accounts, and channels where they can showcase their content, these platforms give people a sense of ownership in their contributions.

Unfortunately, several of the largest social media platforms have lost their way in recent years. Harmful content, misinformation, and a steady stream of privacy scandals have eaten away at the trust on these platforms.

That falling distrust creates an opportunity for brands and publishers to create a more engaging website experience. Users who create content and contributions on your platform are more likely to come back, buy and stay engaged. Websites can continuously evolve their offerings to maintain audience engagement.

Growing Revenue With User Generated Content and First-Party Data

Driving increased revenue from your user’s content is easy once you have the proper framework. The starting point is to review your technology to ensure your website offers an engaging experience.

We briefly define first-party data and why it is essential. First-party data is information you gain directly from people interacting with your website, app, and other digital experiences. There is no go-between involved. First-party data is robust because it fuels personalization and makes it easier to create compelling experiences.

1. Build your first-party data foundation

Before you can grow revenue, you need the right foundation in place. You likely already have several ways of gathering first-party data in place, like your website analytics, email marketing software, and mobile app.

You need a few more tools to leverage in-depth first-party data.

• Arena Live Chat. Live chat is one of the best ways to transform your website into an interactive digital community. 
• Arena Live Blog. When there’s a breaking news event like an election or sports championship, there’s no such thing as too much coverage for your community. With a live blog you can rapidly publish – and automate – updates to keep your audience coming back for more on your website. 
• Arena Personas. Personas (Beta) help to organize your first-party data in your Arena dashboard so you can better understand what your audience is interested in.
• Video streaming solution. Offering a video experience directly to your audience from your website is another way to deepen your relationship with your audience. Arena offers video integration with Vimeo and other platforms.

With these platforms in place, your website will be equipped to delight your audience.

2. Make it easy for your audience to share user-generated content 

Persuading your audience to get into the habit of creating and posting content on your website can take time and effort. Fortunately, there are ways to lower the entry bar so your audience can contribute even when they’re busy. Start with these engagement opportunities:

• Reviews. Offering the ability to leave reviews (or star ratings) is a must-have for any website that offers ecommerce.
• Comments. Comments on your blog content are a long-established way to invite engagement.
• Online Event Participation. Sitting down and deeply engaging in an online event takes user-generated engagement to the next level. Your users can share content by participating in the chat session, reacting to other user comments, voting in polls, and more.

As you deepen your relationship with your audience, offering additional opportunities to engage is worth the effort. For example, consider inviting social media influencers to participate or even co-host your next digital event.

3. Reward user engagement 

Giving your audience rewards – tangible or otherwise – leverages the psychology of habit formation to keep your audience coming back for more. 

The way you reward engagement will depend on the size of your audience and your resources. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

Community Badges

Badges are a simple way to recognize your most engaged community members for websites that let users create accounts and post content. For example, Podia’s badge options include founder (i.e., for the first ten members) and other badges based on tenure (e.g., a member over one year).

Appreciation Message

Put aside automation for a moment and spend a few minutes thanking your top participants. Whether you send an email, put a letter in the mail, or send a direct message, thoughtful messages can go a long way to keeping your top community members engaged.

Invitation To Events And Special Status

Inviting your top users to an event like a company conference is a powerful way to show appreciation. Quora had a Top Writers program to recognize top contributors. 

Tangible Rewards

Sending a small gift to your top community members is a great way to keep members engaged. A consumer company might send a discount code or offer a credit for a purchase.  Sending a gift card is another way to thank your top members.

These member recognition efforts vary in terms of the effort and cost involved. It’s generally best to reserve your most expensive recognition efforts for the most engaged community members.

4. Deepen engagement with online events and communities

Regularly publishing great content is an excellent way to draw people to your website. Encouraging people to become regular contributors to your community is even more valuable. That’s where events have an essential role to play in lifting engagement.

Arena has a wealth of resources to inspire your next event. Start with the following to get your online event idea:

Once you have your event concept in mind, use the virtual events checklist to plan, promote and run your online event successfully.

5. Enhance loyalty with first-party data campaigns

Using the strategies above, you will have a growing, highly engaged audience who loves your content. Your audience will share content, social reactions, comments, and more on your website regularly. Now, it’s time to ensure you channel that engagement toward your goals.

Clone Your Best Customers

First-party data can reveal how customers interact with your website, content, and messaging before buying. Use this data to refine your marketing efforts. If you find that conversions are linked to virtual event participation, put more emphasis on drawing your audience into those events.

Use First-Party Data To Spark Referral Campaigns

Using data to drive purchases is just one way to drive action. You can also use these campaigns to spark referrals. Once again, look at the content and experiences that drive the most engagement with your audience. Based on those insights, create more campaigns that ask users to share content and bring more people to your online community.

Increase Personalization Efforts

Personalized content and marketing are more likely to be relevant. When content is relevant, people are more likely to engage, share and buy. Therefore, make it a priority to gather first-party data that you can use for personalization. For example, if you offer an enterprise product, use contact forms and other means to ask new community members if they work for a large company so that you can share relevant information with them.

Increasing Engagement And Revenue Starts With Arena

Higher engagement means more first-party data, which fuels relevance and personalization – which ultimately drives up revenue. To seize those benefits, it’s crucial to have the right platform. Discover how to build an online community on your website with Arena.

For years, news organizations have struggled in the cold war with social media. Initally, classified revenue plummeted thanks to the rise of Craigslist, then, Google, Facebook, and Amazon stepped in, pulling billions of dollars in advertising revenue that used to be owned by traditional publishing. Today, a handful of mega-companies have successfully built global audiences around content: social media platforms.

To survive and thrive in the 2020s, news organizations need to study and model the specific tactics and strategies of the social media giants. Given that many social media platforms have been knocked down from their high-ground recently, the timing has never been better to take action.

Lesson 1: Offer A Highly Personalized Content Experience To Grow Engagement

Customized news feeds and streams lie at the heart of successful social media. Facebook gives you news updates on friends and family. Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and other platforms offer a curated experience focused on individual users’ interests. Developing this highly curated experience requires the contribution of many engineers, algorithms, and countless experiments.

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Applying this lesson to the news organization starts by offering filters. Some of your audience might only want business news, while others simply want coverage of their favorite sports team. Rather than forcing all users to flip through all of your news content, let them choose their interests. In addition, offering subject-specific email newsletters focused on different news interests (e.g., sports, business, local news) will help to deepen audience engagement.

Building detailed profiles of your audience’s likes and dislikes is vital for boosting engagement. Another benefit to offering a customized experience is that you will have better first-party data on your audience. Consequently, you will be able to market your subscriptions more effectively. Also, you will have the opportunity to offer more targeted advertising options to your advertisers.

Lesson 2: Adapt To Changing Media Consumption Habits

Consuming social media content and updates is addictive for a reason. These platforms offer the potential for social validation and a constant stream of novelty. That’s not all – many users are turning to social media to access news content. 

Consumption of news is a primary driver of social media.

According to Deloitte’s 2022 digital media trends research, the top five reasons US consumers use social media include reading or watching the news (27%), listening to music (28%, watching TV shows and movies (23%), shopping (17%), play video games (22%) and watch sports (13%). These findings tell us that there is considerable appetite for news. Deloitte points out that the popularity of news consumption on social media is driven by algorithmic customization and cost (i.e., no paid subscription needed). 

User-Generated Content Is Gaining In Popularity

Above and beyond news consumption, many social media users are interested in user-generated content. It’s important to note that user-generated content is a broad term that covers professional-grade content creators with high production values, hobbyists, and much more. Deloitte’s research found that 70% of Gen Z now regularly consume user-generated content – a figure that has rapidly increased over the past year.

Short-Form Video Content Is Booming

Short video content, typically less than a minute long, is thriving. The most popular content creators on TikTok, like Khabane Lame, Charli d’amelio, and Addison, have uploaded over 1,000 videos to build their audience. Many successful short videos feature videos, dancing, and humor. 

Adapting To New Media Consumption Habits

Adapting to these habits as a news organization is challenging. Traditionally, news organizations focus on high production values and professionalism, which isn’t always found in user-generated content. Despite that challenge, there are opportunities to respond to this challenge. Take video content as an example. Your organization likely has significant strengths in video production and editing. Use those capabilities to create content like TikTok videos and YouTube shorts like the Washington Post.

Lesson 3: Emphasize Individuals In Addition To Your Corporate Brand

Many, if not most, social media success stories involve individuals. Take MrBeast (i.e., Jimmy Donaldson) on YouTube. With more than 100 million subscribers, he has built one of the most successful channels on the platform. Many other top channels on the platform are built around individuals like Eminem, Justin Bieber, and Swedish YouTube star PewDiePie. 

Applying this lesson in a new organization is relatively easy. For the past decade, many successful journalists like Maggie Haverman (New York Times), Rachel Maddow (MSNBC), and Anderson Cooper (CNN) have built a large following on Twitter. The opportunity to interact directly with your journalists is crucial. Fundamentally, engaging with a specific person is easier than with a brand.

Building an audience around a personal brand is easier for several reasons. Forming a parasocial relationship where an audience member feels connected to the content creator is easier. Social media personalities sometimes deepen these relationships by adding exclusive experiences to paying customers using platforms like Patreon.

There are a few ways to apply this social media lesson to your news organization. Look at all of your public-facing journalists and personalities and their online profiles. Find out who successfully engages with their followers by looking at replies, likes, and comments. Invite your most successful journalists to present their best practices to others in the organization.

Lesson 4: Encourage Niche Communities

Social media platforms are excellent at bringing together small groups of people with shared interests. For example, there are online groups for people interested in obvious things like real estate investing, auto repair & fashion and each of these larger audience can be further cut into niche segments.

Let’s take sports as an example. Spending five or ten minutes searching through Facebook you can easily find groups like:

• Obsessed with NCAA Wrestling Updates (9,000+ members)
• NBA Fantasy Basketball Discussion (11,000+ members)
• Mets Fans For Life (18,000 members)
• Yankees Fans (100,000+ fans)

These examples show an audience like “sports fans” has multiple significant segments. News organizations with deep connections in local sports teams have an opportunity to shine by creating dedicated niche communities. Getting started is easier than you might imagine because news organizations already have high-quality content to build their communities on. 

Lesson 5: Embrace Technical Innovation

Move fast and break things is a well-known saying in the technology industry. Social media platforms often launch new features as they observe their users and advertisers. For example, Instagram has recently focused on video content to compete more effectively against TikTok. 

News organizations may not have the same kind of product development, engineering, and technical bench strength as social media companies. Fortunately, this is less of a disadvantage than you might think. The rise of no-code and low-code platforms and integrations means adding new technologies to your website is easier than ever.

Want to improve your coverage and engagement of rapidly developing news stories like international conflicts and elections? You can install Arena Live Blog on your website in a few minutes. Want to build online events like the Wall St Journal’s Live Q&A Events? Add Arena Live Chat to your website to supplement the video streaming experience so your audience can share their feedback and questions.

Don’t Ignore Your Greatest Strength As You Innovate

There’s no doubt that news publishers can draw lessons from social media platforms. Yet, there’s a danger in drawing too much inspiration from these platforms. You don’t want to lose the soul of your organization as you chase growth. 

The most trusted news organizations have built audiences for decades. Social media companies don’t invest in investigative journalism. News organizations hold elected officials accountable for their actions and words. The best news organizations focus on fact-checking and admitting mistakes. In contrast, social media platforms have a much less impressive track record of quality and accountability.

Investigation, fact-checking, and taking on powerful interests carry a cost. Yet, those commitments are ultimately critical for maintaining your reputation and keeping engaged subscribers. If your audience loses trust in your organization, selling subscriptions and advertising space will become more difficult.

The good news is that you can innovate without selling your soul as a news organization. The first step is to add the right technology to your website. These technologies don’t require weeks or months of customization and implementation either. You can be up and running in a matter of hours when you choose Arena.

Transform The News Into An Interactive Community Experience

Publishing high-quality news, analysis, and information are no longer enough to sustain news organizations. Your website needs to offer an online community to win attention and engagement from social media platforms. Your audience wants to ask questions, meet people who share their interests, and more. Right now, social media offers these community experiences. Yet social media lacks the commitment to investigation, reporting, and truth that leading news organizations have.

Give your audience a chance to interact with each other, and engagement will go up. Page views and time on site will also increase. Book a demo with Arena today to discover how to engage your audience more.