WhatsApp Communities
All have been difficult for publishers wanting to monetise content, drive website referrals or grow brand loyalty. All are algorithm based and newsrooms have no say in which content gains exposure. The solution? Direct messaging. After months of research, building prototype systems and taking learnings from newsletters publishing Reach PLC has launched its first wave of WhatsApp Communities delivering news, sport, entertainment and one off events directly to thousands of people - no algorithm. Starting small in Q1 with HullLive testing a breaking news group it became clear audiences love it and the returns were better than we imagined. This should be no surprise as the Reuters Institute Digital News Report has been highlighting the growth of WhatsApp and news consumption for a while. WhatsApp in Europe and Asia is the third biggest platform for news consumption and in Latin American and Africa it is the second. In the UK the report highlights that WhatsApp is the second most used platform for 18 to 24s but is the one of the lowest for news consumption with WhatsApp mainly being used as a text messaging platform - according to Meta. We see this as an opportunity to grow audiences and build direct relationships between readers and our brands. Meta also confirmed to us that Reach is the only publisher in the world actively creating communities and developing API solutions to send pictures, videos and links at scale to take advantage of the opportunity. The results? Staggering! Reach has grown more than 80 WhatsApp Communities since its official launch at the start of Q2 this year ranging from traffic and travel to Royals and Liverpool FC news. One of our biggest successes was a temporary Eurovision group which grew to 2,000 members in a few days and achieved 17,000 page views from those members during Eurovision week. WhatsApp is giving us the loyalty seen in email newsletters but open rates and click through rates four or five times higher with WhatsApp also appealing to younger people. Our communities now have 120,000 people signed up who receive a handful of daily messages, written in a conversational style that fits with the app. Those messages have a 90% open rate with the majority opening them immediately due to the high penetration of the platform. We have also found that it is not unusual to gain more page views or videos views than the number of people in the community due to the sharing nature of the platform. From mid April we built our first 10,000 members across all groups and we gained 135,000 page views in less than three weeks. In May, members climbed to 18,000 and page views increased to 350,000 and in November we will record 2.4m views from 120,000 subscribers. Next we are exploring a full API solution, sponsorship to make our groups even more valuable to us and help us become less reliant on algorithms.