top of page

South China Morning Post

PRODUCTION EDITOR, SOCIAL MEDIA

Nov 2017 - Aug 2020

  • Instagram
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • YouTube

I moved to Hong Kong in 2017 to take up the role of Production Editor, Social Media. I was running the social media accounts of Hong Kong's newspaper of record during some of the city's most tumultuous years, breaking protest-related news and pandemic-related news from within Mainland China on social media before it reached much of the world.

Pasted Graphic 63.png

Using Instagram to cover breaking news

During Hong Kong's protests in 2017, we sought to broaden our breaking news coverage beyond traditional platforms like Facebook and Twitter. We recognised the untapped potential of Instagram's visual and interactive features and shifted our efforts to the platform. While Facebook continued to drive the majority of traffic, engagement on Instagram soared as we increased our protest coverage.

​

At the peak of the protests, we were posting, on average, five to six carousel Instagram posts every day, with some garnering tens of thousands of likes, as you can see here and here. To this day they remain some of the account's most liked posts. We also published several deep dives as Stories. Both feed posts and stories linked back to the site and drove a healthy amount of traffic. 

Promoting award-winning podcasts on social media

Instagram stories are a great tool for promoting podcasts, as they allow you to share quick snippets of your content in an engaging way. At South China Morning Post, I worked with the podcast team to promote their award-winning podcasts, 'Eat Drink Asia' and 'Inside China Tech'.

 

I created a series of visually appealing graphics and used 'Headliner' to turn them into audiograms to share on Instagram Stories. Audiograms are a combination of audio clips and visual elements that help to grab the viewer's attention and encourage them to listen to your podcast.

 

I made sure to choose engaging and attention-grabbing clips from the podcast series, paired with eye-catching graphics, and added relevant hashtags to each story.

Increasing video views with a carefully-executed reposting strategy

As a team we devised a reposting strategy that saw the number of video views increase on Twitter by 300% and on Facebook by 200%.

​

The date each video was last posted was tracked on a spreadsheet, along with the corresponding URL. As opposed to uploading the file anew each time, we used Facebook's crossposting feature while making sure to leave at least three weeks in between a repost.

​

On Twitter, our posting strategy differed due to the nature of the algorithm.

Tools and software used in this role

  • Echobox

  • Later

  • Photoshop

  • Wotchit

  • Headliner

  • Google Analytics

  • Facebook Business Manager

bottom of page