Financial Times posting stories on WhatsApp to gain new readers

The Financial Times has been broadcasting stories through WhatsApp for the past year as a way of reaching new readers, reports Lucinda Southern of Digiday.

Southern writes, “During that time it has honed its content strategy to push out more specific market-related stories, rather than general news, and has found that people who access the FT’s journalism through WhatsApp are more likely to return to its site in the next seven days.

“For the last six weeks, after running surveys with its WhatsApp base, the FT has started posting one or two free-to-access market-focused stories a day. Some that have driven the most traffic have been ‘Why did the pound fall so fast?‘ ‘The five market charts that matter for investors‘ and ‘Banks begin moving some operations out of Britain.‘ Stories with charts also do particularly well.

“‘One of our metrics of success is quality visits — people who come and return within seven days — these people are more likely to become subscribers,’ said Alana Coates, audience engagement editor at the Financial Times. The likelihood that readers from WhatsApp will return to the FT within the next seven days is 40 percent higher than the average (a global benchmark set by the FT), although it wouldn’t share absolute figures.”

Read more here.