What's Up? WhatsApp Channels!

Bi-weekly news commentary

Hello friend,

How are you? I hope you had a wonderful week.

Quick update, to maximize value to you and minimize the number of emails from me, I moved my bi-weekly News Commentary from Tuesdays to my regular drop on Sundays.

With that, let’s talk about traffic.

If you remember, publishers used to rely on Facebook and Google to drive traffic to their websites, but since they downgraded news prominence, publishers looked for other platforms.

In the age of brand storytelling, you don’t need to be a newspaper to want to maximize awareness and traffic to your content.

I’d say today all brands are publishers running their in-house storytelling powerhouses.

I covered this in this podcast episode when chatting with Stephanie Paterik, an Executive Editor at Adweek at the time: How to Tell Visual Stories Like A Media Company?

The gist: Publishers have recently discovered WhatsApp Channels, a new feature launched late last year. It’s a one-way broadcasting tool that allows publishers to send followers text, photos, videos, stickers, and polls. As a channel admin, your phone number and profile photo won’t be shown to followers. Recipients can only react to posts with emojis but not comment, which from a publisher’s perspective makes it easier to manage.

I’ve just started my channel I invite you to check out.

Learn more about why WhatsApp Channels are effective and how you could use them to spread your stories as part of your overall distribution strategy.