Hi Sam, thank you very much for taking the time to do this interview. You recently wrote on LinkedIn that many content writers check their article's SEO performance but few analyze how their pieces are doing on social media. Why do you think is this the case?
As content writers, our goal is to get articles to rank in search results. We're trained to write for search intent and monitor SEO performance. After the writing process, writers may check on an article's ranking now and then, but generally speaking, we move on once a piece is published.
I think this is because writers aren't typically looped into the entire content process, from ideation to distribution. In my experience, clients don't typically expect any input on how to distribute or promote an article on social media (though, some welcome it!), so writers may not even be aware if and when one of their articles is shared.
After the writing process, we move on once a piece is published.
You started with Authory about 6 months ago. How did it help you with tracking your content's social media performance?
Before I started using Authory, I didn't even think about how my published articles performed on social media. I rarely checked to see if my clients even shared them on their social channels.
It wasn't until I started getting weekly updates from Authory about my articles' social media impact that I even realized this was a metric worth paying attention to.
The weekly update emails sum up the social media interactions my articles received on Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest, so I can see which channel my article performed best on. I've been a freelance writer for over 5 years, so it would've been cool to track these insights all this time!
What do you gain from analyzing and comparing your articles' social media performance? How does it help you as a freelance writer?
I think the biggest benefit of writers seeing their articles' social media impact is understanding their audiences better. When you can see that an article performed well on social media, then you know that it resonated (or sparked conversations) with that audience.
For freelance writers, these insights empower us to pitch relevant and timely article ideas to clients. Just like social media marketers monitor social performance to see what people engage with, writers can monitor social impact to see how people react and identify new angles for story ideas.
Thanks so much for your time, Sam!
You can find Nala at authory.com/SamLauron, and if you want to give it a try for yourself, simply create an Authory account for free. It takes 3 minutes only!
