Reach your audience using filters

by. Matt Neznanski

I was in my favorite coffee shop the other day when I overheard a repairman discussing the sad fate of the shop’s furnace: it had given up the ghost after a fairly short life. The problem was that somewhere along the line, no filters had been installed. Instead, all the dust, cooking smoke, and more had been running through the equipment, gumming up the works and forcing a several hundred dollar repair for lack of a $2 maintenance item.

Young adults are exposed to an incredible amount of media, and from more than just the traditional sources of information. Brands, agencies, and anyone with a Twitter, Instagram or Facebook account can fill our feeds with all sorts of stuff, most of which we never read. To cope, people report spam,  mark read,and unfriend just to get through the day. Funny thing is, by pre-filtering the content you create and share, the better you’ll be at getting through to your audience.

Everyone wants to post items that get shared wildly around the web. But the reality is that for most of us, we’re better off consistently providing helpful information than creating click bait and comedy. That means, as publishers, we need to create our own filter and live by its rules:

1. Attention is better than pageviews

Page views (as a measure of value) have reached the end of the line. Meanwhile, even social engagement is an unreliable indicator of real reach among an audience, when thousands of likes and followers can be had for meager investment.

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