Just how does HLN host Nancy Grace pick the stories for her program that makes them go viral? In a profile published yesterday at Buzzfeed, we learn just what tools she uses to find the cases to talk about.
It works like this: Crowdtangle tracks and monitors millions of posts and keywords across social media platforms — with an emphasis on Facebook — in order to identify topics and individual Facebook posts that are performing better than average for a page or individual. In HLN’s case, Grace’s reporters, producers, and social media managers plug in a series of topics and keywords to Crowdtangle, taking pains to look for stories from a massive list of local news affiliate Facebook pages — for Nancy Grace’s page, this means a focus on abductions, abandoned children, stalkers, rapists, serial killers, and grisly domestic crime. Then, Crowdtangle scans the social web, sending alerts to the team if it finds a story that’s compelling high rates of Facebook sharing.
“If we see something really over-performing at a local level, that’s usually a good indicator there’s national interest,” HLN’s Senior Director of Social Media Strategy and News, Katie Caperton, told BuzzFeed News. “I can see that this kid’s gone missing and that every affiliate who also posts about this missing child is seeing 20-40 times the average engagement. We choose to create our own content around the story if we believe we’ll get that engagement from our followers on the national level as well.”
And the Nancy Grace show Facebook page racked up 2,389 likes and 3,102 shares in just 36 minutes recent “abandoned baby” graphic, Buzzfeed reports.
(H/t Buzzfeed)
