Case Study: Sophi Social for The Globe and Mail

Executive Summary

The Globe and Mail was posting 22 articles to Facebook daily. But, as Canada’s leading newspaper, The Globe was creating much more content than that and we wanted to share more of our ambitious journalism online each day with our audience. So, we turned to our AI-powered solution, Sophi Social, to figure out the optimal post frequency to get more articles to our readers without diminishing engagement.

Sophi Social was able to identify what would be our best-performing content on Facebook and autonomously post 50% more articles. This increased reach and engagement dramatically. What surprised us even more was that Sophi Social also increased subscriptions by 215%.

The Company

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s foremost news media company, leading the national conversation and effecting policy change through brave, independent journalism since 1844. The Globe’s award-winning coverage of business, politics and national affairs reaches six million readers every week in print and online. The Globe believes the future of journalism lies in its ability to bring readers the stories they both want and need to know. That’s why the company invested in innovation and data science, hiring data scientists from leaders in the tech industry to develop Sophi –an artificial intelligence platform for Natural Language Processing, prediction and optimization –and used it to automate digital content curation and develop a fully dynamic paywall.

The Challenge

It’s widely known in the industry that posting too much content on Facebook will lower engagement with your content. We were posting an average of 22 posts per day and seeing high reach and engagement. But The Globe was publishing much more content than that and we wanted to share more of our hard-hitting journalism online each day with the people it matters to. We tried increasing our daily content frequency by a small amount and that actually decreased our reach and shares. So we had to keep experimenting until Sophi Social found the optimal way to get more content to our readers without any negative impact on engagement and reach.

Results

Using Sophi Social, The Globe and Mail achieved its goal of posting more content without decreasing reach OR engagement. As we honed Sophi Social, we were able to post 50% more content to Facebook (from 22 to 33 articles) and see KPIs go up across the board:

• 62% increase in shares

• 33% increase in comments

• 39% increase in reach

• 25% increase in likes

These results were more than we expected as the increase in both engagement and reach is counter to conventional wisdom – our results even impressed our contacts at Facebook.

What surprised us even more was that Sophi Social also increased subscriptions by 215%.