Syndicated press. What is it and how can you use it to your brand’s advantage?
Content syndication is a method of republishing content on other sites in order to reach a broader audience.
For example, you might have noticed our Alcohol Awareness Week case study for our client Chris Hill featuring on other news sites such as WhatsNew2Day, Evoke, Headlinez Pro and TW News following its publication on the Mail Online.
Syndicated content not only increases your reach and brand awareness, but it also builds links within other sites and can help drive more traffic to your company domain. This method of exposure is particularly useful if you’re a smaller publisher or business who wants to reach a larger audience through a more authoritative site.
So how can we use knowledge of syndicated press to our PR advantage? Let’s look at the different ways in which press content can be syndicated!
Organic Syndication:
It may be difficult to believe, but there are plenty of news sites out there in the internet space that operate solely on their own and don’t require the manual upload of stories from say a journalist or blogger.
Instead, these little news-gems upload stories automatically by analysing the web for the most recent, most read and most topical stories from a mixture of different press including national, specialist and regional news.
This means that by getting your brand story onto the Mail Online for example, your story, in the eyes of online algorithms, becomes one of the most read and topical news stories available on the web.
This is the time when these sub-sites begin taking that content from the Mail Online domain and republishing the story to their own readers. They might syndicate pieces of content in their entirety, edit articles down to a shorter piece, or just publish a selected excerpt.
The exact details can vary from one publication to another but the more sites that do this, the more coverage you’ll get and the higher your reach and domain authority will be as a result!
To readers, it looks like any other article written on a news site – the only difference is that the content is listed as previously appearing elsewhere, which is usually indicated on the page, like this:
Publicist/Journalist Syndication:
Syndication in the media industry is not as new as it sounds. Many of the current publishing companies such as Newsquest, Reach PLC and Johnston Press still regularly push out the same content to different new sites they own.
This can be anything from a regional output to an international output depending on the company’s size. However, understanding how they work can be very beneficial when looking to maximise a story or brand’s exposure.
Let’s look at the way the publicist Newsquest, operates in terms of their syndication.
Newsquest, a relatively smaller publisher than TI-Media or the Daily Mail Group, syndicates stories by region. This means that by publishing a story on any title from their South West title base for example, will result in a further appearance in each of the below titles, maximising your story’s reach and domain authority with up to 13 pieces of regional coverage rather than just one.
Other publishers such as Reach PLC now even have a ‘shared content unit’ which details a full team of journalists whose job is to push out non-location specific news content to regional press across the UK in both print and online formats.
Understanding the operations of these publishers is handy a tool for any writer or small business looking to build a higher domain authority and enhanced SEO.
So why try it?
If your brand has excellent content but limited traffic and exposure online, then your ideas are somewhat wasted by living where eyeballs are minimal.
Syndicating your content to a third party or making use of how the UK publisher companies operate, can get better use out of it, placing it in front of the types of audiences you want to attract to your site!
Not to mention that with a large website audience, syndication websites often have large social followings as well. Between their own social promotion of syndicated content and their audience’s subsequent social shares, you can gain a lot of visibility by syndicating on top of your own reach.
This can help your online audiences grow at fraction of the cost and effort!