In 2020, PolitiFact earned a grant to begin creating fact-checking videos at home to build our YouTube following. A few staffers (including me) were sent full video kits in order to start scripting and filming weekly videos. It was a learning curve, but it was key to our audience strategy to engage new audiences, and it worked! (see notes below). Here were are a few of the pieces I scripted and filmed:
Some notes on our video engagement:
From April 1 2020 to December 31 2020, we published 54 videos and had over 760,000 views in that time, on YouTube alone. By publishing our videos consistently, we were able to gain 5,400 new youtube subscribers and over $3000 of revenue from advertising.
As a result of posting videos to IGTV, we appeared in more searches, more on the explore page, and our shares went up across the board on instagram. We went from posting no IGTVS, to once or twice weekly, which contributed to tripled followers (from 10,000 to 29,000 followers) and we got 25 times more video views this year than that same time last year. PolitiFact saw 196.2k IGTV video views overall.
On Facebook, as a result of our concerted video efforts produced, in-house videos (not social videos with text and images) we tripled our video viewership.
Beyond the produced videos, I also do Instagram Lives with reporters, in order to shine a light on our fact-checking process, as well as Instagram stories and TikToks.