Program

Audience Community of Practice: 2024 goals, priorities, and predictions

December 20, 2023

The Audience Community of Practice met on Thursday, January 18 to discuss Q1 goals and priorities for the year ahead.  Will Threads supersede X? Are WhatsApp Channels the new newsletter? We wanted to hear what’s top-of-mind for audience teams as we head into 2024. 

With an election year ahead and lots of interesting news stories to cover, many folks are prioritizing improvements to top-of-the-funnel channels. Whether upgrading to a brand-new website, optimizing pages for SEO, or revamping newsletter strategies, Q1 is the time to perform product audits and make sure that everything is in place for the year ahead.

Some potential focus areas for audits and optimizations:

• Reviewing push notifications
• Revamping CTAs
• Creating landing pages for newsletters
• Improving accessibility across platforms

SEO was also top-of-mind, especially surrounding live events. A helpful strategy is creating SEO pre-writes by using Google Trends or similar tools to find popular terms people look for around an event, then pre-writing your SEO list to be ready to go when interest peaks.
The same SEO strategies can be used for building audiences around elections coverage by researching what people in your area were looking for in 2020 or 2022 to better understand how people search for things like ballot measures and voting resources.

Resource links:

• Google Trends, Answer the Public
• INN resources on audience research from our October Audience CoP call
• AFP Fact Check WhatsApp channel
• Thoughts on Threads Vs. Bluesky from PressGazette