Forbes using social media to boost readership

Lewis Dvorkin, the chief product officer at Forbes, writes about how the business magazine is using social media to attract more readers.

Dvorkin writes, “For starters, we’ve assembled an Audience Development team that targets new sources of traffic from social media networks and the various information ecosystems across the Web. That team (more business-side oriented) works hand-in-hand with our Channel Product managers (more editorially focused) to develop and implement audience growth strategies. Their work, in turn, informs our topic coverage and our contributor recruitment efforts. They all work together to instruct our full-time editors, reporters and our growing base of contributors on the best ways to distribute their content to reach and capture followers and fans.

“We also have product and design teams. Among other things, they work with Audience Development and Channel Managers on specific tactics, such as the most efficient placement of sharing buttons. Just this month, with the release of our World Billionaires List, we rolled out Like buttons on our people profile pages. The product and design teams also work with our partners, such as Social Amp, to facilitate discussion on Forbes.com that news consumers can share with others on their social streams.

“Our daily content promotion and programming managers also get involved. In just six months they’ve taken steps to grow our Twitter followers to nearly 300,000 from 86,000 and our Facebook fan base to almost 100,000 from 56,000 .”

Read more here.