News Outlets: 3 Ways to Increase Millennial Interaction with Online Content

For news outlets, creating and sharing content online is more important now than ever. Given our increasingly digital world, appealing to millennial readers by focusing on making web content more accessible isn’t an option—it’s a requirement of the industry. As a Northwestern student specializing in journalism and integrated marketing communications, I’ve found two articles that I think you will find interesting as you consider how to best reach millennial news consumers.

In her article for Business Insider, Audrey Schomer notes that millennials (age 21-37) consume a mere 8,766 minutes of news a year on average compared to their older counterparts, who consume closer to 30,103 minutes a day. Yet she also highlights the fact that when millenials do consume news, its digital reach is greater than it is to that same older age group—digital news reaches 88% of millennials. A last important note from Schomer’s article—many people in this demographic highlight convenience as their favorite aspect of social media; further, about half (48%) of social media news consumers ages 18-29 felt that accessing news on social made them better informed. Thus, it stands to reason that streamlining web content would increase millennial consumption of news.

A graphic from a 2018 Nielsen study on digital media use.

(Source: https://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2018/time-flies-us-adults-now-spend-nearly-half-a-day-interacting-with-media.html)

As per the graph above, Nielsen conducted a study in July of 2018 that resulted in a shocking outcome—American adults spend over 11 hours a day listening to, watching, reading, and interacting with digital media. Notably, smartphones are the tool that enables a great deal of this usage. Over 72% of the 18-34 demographic view video content on social networking sites at least once a day, if not more; various digital platforms allow consumers to stay connected to the digital world to a greater extent than they ever have before. Younger generations tend to devote the majority of their time to smartphones and computers instead of TV; the portability of new devices allows adults older than 18 to spend an average of 45 minutes a day on social media—in large part on smartphones.

Given these insights, I’ve developed three action items that will help news outlets make their content more accessible to millennial consumers:

·             Turn to social.

o   Digital news reaches 88% of millennials while national TV news reaches 61% of them; thus, providers would do better to produce news for social to hit a wider target demographic.

·             Convenience is key.

o   Since digital consumers see so much media every day, they will not take the extra time to investigate materials that aren’t convenient to access, meaning that news agencies / marketing firms need to make sure their digital material is right at consumers’ fingers.

·             Hook consumers early.

o   Digital consumers spend, on average, 11 hours interacting with digital media a day—they see a lot of news, so make content interesting/interactive to get clicks.

Effective use of digital content can make or break a news outlet, and the industry must implement it to grow.