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USA Today Owes New Registrations to Social Media
When USA Today redesigned its website in March, it expected improved metrics. The metrics it got, however, were nothing short of stellar: New registrations at the re-launched USAToday.com are up 380% over pre-launch numbers, the Gannett-owned paper reported last month.
The new USAToday.com -- part of the paper's "Network Journalism" initiative -- is all about community-building and features video, blogs, and reader forums, as well as dynamic content rating, sharing, and recommendation tools. Thanks in large part to those tools, the paper says, the site has experienced dramatic performance gains; its unique visitor rates have increased 21% since February and more than 40,000 user comments have been published alongside news stories on the site since March. The numbers are proof that information is more powerful when consumers can interact with it, create it, and share it with their peers.