Thomson Reuters is one of the world's leading providers of news and information for businesses and professionals. The Thomson Corporation and Reuters Group merged in 2008, but have both, independently, been part of the media landscape for more than a century. These days, Thomson Reuters is a huge operation, with more than 60,000 employees working in more than a hundred nations. Their operating revenue in 2014 was $US12.6 billion. Their headquarters is situated at 3 Times Square, Manhattan. Thomson Reuters is truly a massive brand - I was fortunate enough to get a chance to speak to Adam Cohen, Social Media Manager for Thomson Reuters, to get some insights into how social is being utilized by such a huge company in the information services arena.
Church and State
Given the varied nature of what they do, the totality of Thomson Reuters' presence has to be considered in divisions. For example, their main brand handle on Twitter (@thomsonreuters) has an impressive 110 thousand followers. But their partner handle for the Reuters News Service (@Reuters) has 6.78 million - and those are only two of the more than 100 Twitter handles used by representatives of Thomson Reuters around the world. I asked Cohen about the split and whether there's oversight linking the many brand identities on social.
"Our relationship with the Reuters social team has always had an essence of Church and State," Cohen told me. "That's not to say that we're completely separate, but we try to stay out of their way when it comes to things like channel governance. However, we do work together quite frequently.
"Our collaborations are mostly reserved for events, things like Newsmakers, World Economic Forum in Davos, and more. We'll always support and amplify their content through our channels, but the Reuters channels are strictly for news, so we don't expect cross promotion - though the occasional retweet from @Reuters is certainly nice."
Given their wide scope of processes and products, and the various audiences Thomson Reuters is trying to connect with, I asked Cohen if they have a core mission statement for social, a singular purpose for their online presence.
"We're a very unique company in that our businesses are very diverse, and that we, as a company, produce such an abundance of content," Cohen said. "We really do a little bit of everything - promoting our brand and products, social selling, customer service, content marketing, etc. From where I sit, in corporate, we try to keep a balanced approach in terms of the type of content we're pushing out. Also, since we have the largest non-editorial channels, we're always trying to amplify the messages being sent from our smaller, business-unit level accounts. I wouldn't exactly say that we have a core mission in social that differs from our core mission as a company, of delivering critical information to professionals."
Priority Platforms
Looking at the numbers, Thomson Reuters is clearly winning at generating audience interest on social. Aside from the aforementioned massive audience on Twitter, they also have more than 538,000 followers on LinkedIn (35.7 likes per post, 5.9 posts per day), 122,000 Likes on Facebook (32 likes per post, 6.1 posts per week) and more than 1.2 million followers on Google+ (15.3 +1s per post, 2 posts per day). I asked Cohen which platform he considered the best for connecting with Thomson Reuters' audience.
"LinkedIn - with Twitter as a close second," Cohen said. "Our Facebook page has taken a big hit in terms of organic reach, so we're only getting a fraction of the engagement compared to what we were seeing a few years back. LinkedIn's great because we have a large following and the introduction of Showcase Pages allowed us to consolidate our presence on the platform. Also, there's a very natural overlap between our audiences, considering we cater to professionals and LinkedIn is the most 'professional' of the social networks."
"From a content perspective Twitter's a natural fit. We can post frequently on a wide variety of topics across all of our businesses, but because of the streaming nature of the service, it doesn't alienate our audience if a certain tweet doesn't fit their interests," Cohen explained. "It's also easy to 'amplify' the messaging of our other accounts with a simple re-tweet, which allows them to tap into our much larger audience."
And despite that large audience on Google+, Cohen noted that it still hasn't become a major focus. "Google+ is a tough one. We have a really large following, and we have noticed that it's helpful for SEO. While we have decent engagement on the platform, it's not a major driver of traffic, directly, at least."
Phased Advocacy
One element that stood out to me when researching Thomson Reuters' social presence was the amount of current and former staff that list the company in their bios. This, to me, seems like a great sign - the key element of social media is 'social', generating links via word-of-mouth, so the more people talking about and mentioning your brand, the better. Having a whole range of individuals willing to endorse or support the brand by making note of it in their profiles can only be a positive for the company. I asked Cohen how Thomson Reuters approached employee engagement, and whether they have any set guidelines and/or training in social media.
"I'm so glad you noticed that," Cohen said. "We have employee social media guidelines and I run company-wide trainings to encourage responsible use, best practices, etc. One of the tenets of the guidelines is to "be transparent and disclose your relationship to the company," so I guess people are listening."
"Initially, we focused on encouraging our employees to use social media, and to do so responsibly. If that was phase one, then phase two involves putting a great focus on employee advocacy/engagement. We're encouraging them to share content, in the hopes that it can support our digital marketing and sales initiatives."
This approach again underlines the importance of employee advocacy and the role it plays in the context of the wider social media conversation. As Cohen has noted, having your employees play an active role in social can support your digital marketing initiatives - and it clearly does have an impact when you see such a solid social footprint amongst employees who are happy to list their employer's - and even former employer's - name in their bio.
The Showcase
Cohen noted how Thomson Reuters utilizes LinkedIn Showcase Pages. Showcase Pages were introduced by LinkedIn in late 2013 and allow businesses to highlight specific aspects of their business. As noted by Cohen, this fits perfectly with an organization as diverse as Thomson Reuters - I asked Cohen to explain a bit more about how they're using Showcase Pages to best effect.
"As a B2B organization whose primary focus is on professionals, LinkedIn is the most natural fit for us, platform wise. Showcase Pages were a welcome introduction, since they came along right in the midst of one of our major consolidation efforts. The old environment was a big problem for us, since even though we're one company, there were around a hundred "company pages" that held some association with our business. The introduction of Showcase Pages allowed us to get closer to our 'one company' approach on LinkedIn. Our company page is the main focus, but now we have showcase pages that can branch off the main page to allow for the promotion of our flagship products and other brand marketing initiatives."
Video Content
With all the focus on video, I asked Cohen how Thomson Reuters approaches video content. The company already has a strong YouTube presence, with a combined audience of more than 135,000 across their various YouTube channels - were they considering extending that into newer platforms like Vine and Snapchat?
"We're always on the pulse of new channels to determine whether they make sense for our business - we actually just launched an Instagram account," Cohen said. "I think the two major things holding us back from producing more video content or joining platforms like Vine and Snapchat are the resource intensive nature of video and being realistic about our audience. We're going to produce video content if we can determine whether it's valuable for our business. We're going to expand to new platforms if, and only if, we know our professional audience is using that platform. Self-awareness is an important part of our social strategy and voice. At the moment, I would say that our customers likely aren't heavy users of Snapchat or Vine."
This was a great response - rather than riding the latest wave of content marketing popularity and reach, Cohen underlines the need to understand your specific audience. I really liked Cohen's description, that "self-awareness is an important part of our social strategy." This is an important note - whilst general advice and guidelines are useful, what's most important is knowing your audience, who you want to reach and how to reach them.
The Flexibility to Inform
As I normally do, I finished our conversation by asking Cohen to explain, in his words, what the true value of social media is.
"Flexibility," Cohen said. "We're always looking to provide professionals with information in new and exciting ways and social allows us to keep people informed about the evolving nature of the businesses we serve."
A great response - the ability to reach audiences on various platforms and in various formats, to be where they are and reach them where they want. It was great to get a chance to discuss the details of Thomson Reuters' social strategy, some really great insights from a brand with such a huge social presence.