5 small steps journalists can take to build a bigger, more engaged audience

Poynter reporting:

Traffic on news sites isn’t just about page views and unique visits; it’s about people. To build an audience, you have to engage with your site’s users and develop strategies to help you maintain your current audience and attract new audiences, by giving them reasons to keep coming back.
Over the past year, I’ve taken small steps to drive traffic to Poynter.org and have found that they’ve made a big difference. I’ve listed the steps below, with additional ones from NPR’s Matt Thompson, The Huffington Post’s Mandy Jenkins, Facebook’s Vadim Lavrusik and the Associated Press’ Oskar Garcia.

Let sources know about your story, ask them to share it

After you write a story, send it to the people you interviewed and ask them to post it on Twitter, Facebook and wherever else they’d like to share it.
If you’ve interviewed people with a meaningful Twitter presence who regularly engage with their followers, then the story’s much more likely to get in front of an audience who will care about it.
...Include names of sources in tweets and Facebook updates.
If your sources are on Twitter, include their Twitter handles in tweets about your story. This is another way of encouraging your sources to tweet a link to the story or retweet your tweet about it.
Similarly, when posting stories to Facebook, mention sources’ names in your update. The update will then appear on the person’s Facebook page, increasing the chance that your story will reach their audiences. (You have to be Facebook friends with sources, or “Like” their fan pages, for this to work.)
In addition to including sources in my tweets, I sometimes include people who I haven’t interviewed but who I think would be interested in a story. Recently, when tweeting a link to a Poynter.org chat about how journalists can use Tumblr to expand their brand, I cc’d Tumblr’s Mark Coatney on the tweet. He hadn’t been interviewed for the story, but I wanted him to be part of the discussion. He ended up retweeting my tweet and joining the chat.

etc at
http://www.poynter.org/how-tos/digital-strategies/133987/5-small-steps-journalists-can-take-to-build-a-bigger-more-engaged-audience