Brands

Reuters Extends Digital Reach Beyond Social

By Reb Carlson

Reuters, a division of Thomson Reuters, provides financial as well as headline news through Reuters.com, video, mobile, and interactive television platforms.

Reuters is also continuously experimental in online distribution beyond mainstream social media.

While its social audience of more than 300,000 is tuned in, Reuters still looks for new ways for its content to be discovered online, whether by testing with new formats, mediums, or the business of news itself.

Video: A Happy Medium

Reuters has made an investment in video content, making stories shareable and digestible for online audiences. Reuters TV is used as a primary video publisher while Reuters YouTube imports Reuter TV’s playlist to their larger YouTube audience (Reuters YouTube has over 57,965 subscribers while Reuters TV has 15,293).

Reuters TV posts videos daily and distributes to it’s own Twitter and Pinterest pages. With Twitter’s new embedded video feature and the video pinning option on Pinterest, both make great video distribution channels.

Content for Everyone, However They Like It

Reuters makes content customizable and available through many mediums for fragmented audiences.

With a dozen available email newsletters ranging from investing, health, or the presidential election, Reuters can have a placeholder in a reader’s inbox. Reuters News Pro Applications for mobile are available for the iPad, iPhone, Blackberry, and Android devices. The availability of the apps on multiple devices makes Reuters accessible for any professional while they are on the go. Offering RSS feeds for readers also allows readers to make the choice of how to receive their news.

Experiment With Social Distribution

Reuters has communities on established social platforms, but it also looks for new ways to reach potential audiences.

One new venture to reach business professionals is through LinkedIn Today, an aggregate of the top content shared on LinkedIn. Users are also able to customize their stream by following sources.

To encourage people to follow, Reuters directs readers to its LinkedIn Today page through the site, right where they list their Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube presences.

As of now, it has more than 17,500 followers.

Reuters also has presences on Pinterest and Google+ with Reuters TV. Though both platforms’ audiences are far smaller than other channels, the attempts at testing new social platforms for distribution shows a news agency that is adaptable to emerging technology.

No Fear of Curation

While content curation has dominating content marketing blogs, the question comes up on whether news sites should get in on the action. Reuters is testing that notion with Reuters Counterparties, a tool created by Reuters and Percolate that curates content from other news sources.

Reuters considers Counterparties an “experiment” that challenges the question “what would a news website look like if it didn’t need to promote its own content,” according to the Counterparties site. The best way to keep an audience is “to send them away: click on a headline, go straight to another site, and see for [themself].”