Say what you want about Facebook, but media publishers are still able to engage with their audiences there. And it’s not only national broadcasters or well-known brands either. This year Facebook traffic bounced back (somewhat) across the board for publishers.

Sceptical? Take a look at Sosialnytt – a small Norwegian publisher who started out sharing viral stories in 2014 and gradually moved into more general news. When you look at their engagement trend for the past twelve months, you’ll see robust growth.

What’s behind their success? Knowing your audience, posting engaging content *really* often, and making a good use of custom-built filters in EzyInsights Realtime. Read our interview with their Editor-in-Chief Eivind Ertesvåg.

What’s Sosialnytt?
Sosialnytt was created in 2014. We started out writing about stories that would give our readers a good feeling. Typically happy stories from life, trying to “combat” all the negative news we read daily. After some years the page got quite popular in Norway and we started to get more writers and a larger set of topics. In 2017 we started writing about the news in Norway that gets most engagement in social media. So even though we still have focus on stories with good vibes, we also write about all topics that engage Norwegians in social media.

How did you keep track on what’s trending prior to working with EzyInsights?

Before we used Storyboard and Buzzsumo.

What changed when you started using EzyInsights?

With Ezy we are able to always be updated on what’s trending. When a certain type of news get high engagement, we know immediately.

We mainly use Ezy to monitor how well our own articles perform in social media, as well as being updated on what news that create engagement both in Norway and other countries. For us it saved a lot of time finding subjects to write about, and also gives us knowledge that we didn’t have before.

Do you have any tips for other users?

My best tip would be to create your own set of filters. Find out what’s working for you and have a clear idea about what content you are looking for.

What advice can you give to publishers who want to grow their engagement?

My best advice is to know your audience. One piece of content can crate massive engagement on one social media channel or page, and on the other hand have zero engagement on another channel. You have to know what content your readers or followers are interested in, and what content they engage with.

What advice can you give to other publishers about driving traffic from social to website content?

Know your audience. I also have read a lot of advice that you shouldn’t post too often on Facebook. I think many publishers misunderstand the aspect of what and how often you should post. It is true that you shouldn’t post advertisement often, but with engaging content there is a high limit. Remember that engagement on Facebook “dies” quite fast now, so you have to post engaging content often. That’s also a good thing with Ezy, you can track how much engagement your posts have and you know when your posts don’t create any engagement anymore.