Case studies / Bleacher Report
Bleacher Report relies on Twitter for content discovery and editorial strategy.
Quick facts:
- Bleacher Report is the second-largest standalone sports website in the U.S. among multiplatform users with over 44 million unique visitors as of January 2015, according to comScore.
- Bleacher Report now yields over 70 million social referrals per month, and Bleacher Report is ranked as the #1 sports publisher on Twitter, according to Newswhip.
- Bleacher Report’s editorial and video teams create hundreds of pieces of content per day to provide fans with the most comprehensive experience for their favorite teams and topics across all major sports.
Challenge
Bleacher Report, a division of Turner Sports, is a leading digital destination for team-specific sports content and real-time event coverage, reaching over 44M monthly unique users (according to January 2015 comScore data) across a combination of their web and mobile properties. Bleacher Report is also one of the largest publishers on Twitter, and their editorial teams create hundreds of pieces of content per day to provide fans with the most comprehensive, personalized experience for their favorite teams and topics across all major sports.
Bleacher Report provides their readers with an extremely rich, engaging and high quality content, both online and on mobile. “Over time, we’ve become both a platform and a publisher. In addition to breaking our own stories and delivering great original content, we also curate for our readers the absolute best stories from across the web,” notes Bennett Spector, Sr. Director of Bleacher Report’s Media Lab.
With hundreds of contributors creating and curating video and written content in real time on a daily basis, Bleacher Report needed to empower their newsrooms to monitor large volumes of news sources, both internationally and locally, and across a wide spectrum of sports beats. With the huge volume of players, writers, sports fans and other sources on Twitter, it became clear that Twitter could become a key piece in Bleacher Report’s overall content discovery and editorial strategy.
Solution
In designing the overall editorial workflow, the Bleacher Report editorial team looked to a variety of Twitter platform products to build out their ideal content discovery and editorial integration. Their key initiatives include:
- Using TweetDeck and Twitter lists to help break stories and monitor hundreds of streams of Tweets from players, writers and other nationwide sources.
- Using Twitter search API and Tweet embeds, enabling Bleacher Report editors to research and incorporate direct quotes, commentary and photos/videos/Vines into editorial content directly from Twitter.
- Rendering Tweets alongside original content in main sport pages on the web and in the Team Stream app, to o er a single source of topical and up-to-the-minute content to their readers.
To ensure that their editorial sta has the best tools and processes for discovering content, Bleacher Report also incorporated editor training on sourcing content and embedding Tweets in their best practices handbooks
TweetDeck is a valuable tool for our newsroom and the starting point for us to discover breaking news and great editorial content across the internet.
”Results
As a result of their strategy to deeply integrate Twitter, Bleacher Report continues to bring readers the most timely and topical content across all of sports. “TweetDeck is a valuable tool for our newsroom and the starting point for us to discover breaking news and great editorial content across the internet,” notes Spector. Bleacher Report has scaled their usage to every newsroom, monitoring hundreds of streams of Tweets and giving every reporter a tailored 360° view of their news beat.
Moreover, Bleacher Report continues to see Twitter as a major source of tra c for their properties, as social channels account for 30% of the site’s tra c. Bleacher Report uses Twitter’s analytics and reporting tools to view results. “Our editorial team relies on the Twitter Analytics Dashboard to measure and optimize our content’s performance, and helps us make programming decisions in real time,” notes Kenny Dorsett, the company’s Social Media Manager.
Our editorial team relies on the Twitter Analytics Dashboard to measure and optimize our content’s performance, and helps us make programming decisions in real time.
”
Ready to build your solution?