Website before I take over

Regarding the website, The structure and the style of the website is good in general. They  have a catchy logo while the front page of the website is really well organised with a banner with all the categories and while you scroll down you can see the latest articles of each category and each category has different colours which is overall aesthetically pleasing and gives a good visual boost. There is also a category on the front page that is called “meet the members” and then it has all the members with photos and few introductory words about themselves. Also, there is the small logo at the top of the website and takes you immediately  to the main page if you press it. There is also a search banner that directs you everywhere inside the website, although they have not used keywords in order to make it easier for the user to find an article or an author, while they were not using any hashtags in the end of every article in order to make it easier reachable in the research engine. There were also no hyperlinks anywhere in the site in order to direct you to another page of the site. Also they did not have metalinks in order to appear at the top of Google search results.

Moreover, something that I noticed while I was analysing the site was the fact that even though they had many categories (politics, economy, international relations, society, culture, pop culture, sports and interviews) the articles on each category were uneven. For example they had more than 100 articles in the politics category and in economic category and they had only 25 in the sports category and 35 in the culture category while the pop culture and society categories looked like a dumpster for the less important  and less serious articles.

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References

Youth Voice. (2020). Youth Voice – Youth Voice GR. [online] Available at: https://youthvoice.gr/

Social media before I take over

Regarding social media, they do not follow the rule of “different description for different media” they only have Facebook and Instagram – with 4,500 followers on Facebook and 1,376 on Instagram- And they use them only to inform people that they post a new article on their website. There is no audience engagement because the ‘likes’ on both platforms are maximum of 45- Although there are posts with more than 100- and in many cases, those people are the authors of the website while, ‘comments’ below the posts are very rare (Youth Voice, 2020). This shows that there is no clear audience that follows the website and they want to be updates of the new posts.

They did not have Twitter, TikTok or any other social media platform in order to increase the engagement with the audience and advertise themselves. The general vibe of the website is that they do not have a strong social media team and that social media in general are not that important.

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References:

Youth Voice. (2020). Youth Voice – Youth Voice GR. [online] Available at: https://youthvoice.gr/

Article structure before I take over

Youth voice is pluralistic website. Then the main content of the website are articles. They write articles to express their opinion regarding different topics. My observation regarding the articles specifically is that they do not follow the regular article guidelines.
The length of articles are too long, 750 to 1200 words, and too detailed and with no use of images or videos to support the article. Although I have to say that they do not always follow the hot news of the week, they rather prefer to write an article expressing their opinion on a subject that they find interesting. Even though the articles have a good point of view and in my opinion the majority of the articles are very good, they do not follow the current news so that automatically means that it is difficult to attract people to read the articles and make the website more broadly known.

Moreover, the style of the articles is too serious and it comes in contrast with the name of the website “youth voice” because the authors take their job really seriously and not only write with difficult vocabulary and many times they use specific terminology that the meaning of them is not widely known but also most of the articles are about serious issues like the Turkish-Greek conflict regarding the Aegean sea from a geopolitical perspective (Prifti, 2020). This is negative because those serious topics combined with the serious style and the difficult vocabulary makes the articles unappealing to young people.

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Referrences

Prifti, C. (2020). Τουρκία: Το πλέον προβληματικό μέλος του ΝΑΤΟ. [online] Youth Voice. Available at: https://youthvoice.gr/tourkia_nato_problimata_analisi/

Internal Communication after I took over

There was no internal communication, my suspicions were right. Most of the members of the website were strangers and they have not met or spoken before both in person and online. For that reason there was zero support for the articles. There was also no social media or marketing team. There were only three founding members who were doing everything from checking and uploading the posts to sharing them on social media, communicating with the authors, reading the social media and searching for sponsors and collaborations.

The first thing I did to improve the internal communication and the engagement among the employees was to analyse the profiles of all the members and have a twenty minute talk with all of them to introduce myself and see what their capabilities are. After that, I created manager positions starting from the top to the bottom. I put the three founding members as two chief executives and the other one-who is the one who created and developed the website- as IT manager. After that, I created the social media and Public relation team, which has 5 members and I put myself as a manager. I divided my team as three social media representatives, one is responsible for the email and the external communication via email and the other is responsible for the internal communication such as the newsletter, the organisation of virtual meetings and events. On the other categories made managers authors who are specialised in each category. They are responsible to create a group chat and communicate with the authors of the category. Some of their responsibilities are to break the ice between the members by having some weekly  zoom meetings (camera needs to be open all the time) to discuss possible article topics, comment on someone article, and socialise in general. Moreover, the managers check and publish all the articles of their members and inform my team about it to promote the articles on social media.

I have created an internal questionnaire and send it to all the members in order to see if they are happy with the changes with the website in general. I am also in the process of analysing the quantitative data from google and social media analytics in order to have a clear view of our target audience and our competitors. This qualitative and quantitative analysis is essential to form the website’s identity.

Website after I took over

I reorganised the categories of the site and I created subcategories the main categories now are(interviews, news,politics, international,society, art.) While, I created subcategories in the society (science, psychology,environment, sports). After that, I put the two chief editors to clear out all the articles and put them in the correct category.

Moreover, I told them to adapt the articles and use related hashtags and keywords at the end of every article in order to make them more searchable.

I created a new category (News) where we write a small article about current news on every category and promote them on our social media to attract more people. The articles are maximum 200 words with a brief description of the topic and with the use of a video or image.

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Social Media after I took over

Regarding social media. I created a Twitter account as I told them that this platform is quite beneficial for the site since we can use trends  and hashtags to promote our articles.

Along with my Public Relations team, I created strategies to improve the already existing social media accounts. After I put each person responsible for every social media platform I told the Facebook representative to post every news and article as before but now he should include more emojis  and tag the author in the description. Moreover, I inform all the members of the site to share the post in order to achieve organic growth  and attract people. Furthermore, I created two new social media sections (1) international days/anniversaries/what happened on this day years ago (2) post photos with optimistic descriptions or famous quotes that people will use as stories on instagram or share them on Facebook. As for  Twitter, the representative has to do a daily 5 to 7 tweets, those tweets include apart from the articles, any other quote retweets or a visual tweet regarding the top trending topics.

Also I created our own social media hashtag #youthvoiceGr and I told them to use it on all of our posts, stories and shares on all of our platforms.

Articles after I took over

What I did when I got the position was to reduce the length of the articles from 750 to 450-500. I saw on google analytics of the site the average time spent on each article is 10seconds. I explained to them that this means that when people click on the article they immediately exit because of the length of the article, because  people do not have the patience to read so many words especially when they are exposed in plenty of other articles to read online. Plus, they should change the style of each article and put images and video to support it as well as bolt sentences in order to catch the attention of the viewer.

Moreover, I advised them to continue to write about the topics that they are interested in but they should adapt the style of the article and make it more appealing and relaxed by using an understandable vocabulary.

Internal communication before I take over

The internal communication seems problematic because from a search that I did on the authors’ personal facebook and instagram pages most of them are not friends with each other and they share only their articles on their facebook wall and instagram stories, so from an external point of view it looks like they do not have a strong internal communication.