Digital Innovation Digital Publishing
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New FT dashboard helps editors identify and promote relevant archive stories

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The dashboard, created in-house by the Financial Times using Chartio, shows editors which older articles are popular with readers and if they are being found through search, social media or internally.

The Financial Times has developed a new dashboard that allows journalists to identify which stories from the archive are popular with readers again, and re-promote them on social media.

The dashboard launched in August and has been rolled out to the FT’s global social media teams in the past few weeks. It has been built using a platform called Chartio, and shows which archival content has seen an increase in traffic over the previous two weeks, and whether readers are coming to those stories through search, social media or by clicking through from articles posted on ft.com.

“Part of the idea was to have a system in place for how we use older content,” Jake Grovum, US social media editor at the FT, told Journalism.co.uk. “Before this, it was done ad-hoc if something was in the news.

“This is a way to have that content re-surfaced for us and a way to be alerted that something is of interest, so we can re-promote it and let people know we have a story on a particular topic and they might be interested in it because it’s back in the news.”

On average, the articles flagged by the tool and re-promoted have seen more engagement than the FT’s average Facebook posts, getting three times more clicks. They have also performed better than archival content shared by editors without using the dashboard, receiving between 1.5 and 1.7 more clicks on average, as well as more shares and comments.

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