'Liquid content' the key to true content personalisation
Plus: How to deal with Facebook v.2025 and bringing back a community-centred podcast
Good afternoon,
Back after the half-term break, the What I’ve Been Reading digest, instead of being well rested the week after half-term with a stinking cold and wrestling a 15-month-old feels like surviving rather than refreshed. But, we soldier on. Here’s some interesting pieces which came across my timeline in the last week or so…
“Liquid content” puts the consumer in the driver’s seat - Amalie Nash, INMA - a case study on a Finnish broadcaster who have been working to essentially let readers/viewers choose whether they want to read/watch/listen to content on any topic. The term given is ‘liquid content’ and it looks like their content management system - likely with a lot of hard-work going on behind the scenes - is key to making this slick and be able to happen.
There’s a lot of focusing on personalisation when it comes to topic relevancy (show me more about this topic etc) but this is focused on giving you bite-size content, longer reads, audio, video, and letting you consume the news in a way that is right for your context. Smart.
It also led me to this podcast chat with Google’s Matthieu Lorrain which lifts the lid on his take (and probably a good glimpse into how multimedia in search results is only going to increase, as it already has been). Expect to see more YouTube clips and podcast results as transcribing these with AI becomes more straightforward.
POST CLICK: Data-driven ideas for your Facebook page strategy in 2025 - Dan Slee - while Dan’s blog is focused for comms professionals, I would basically say it’s essential reading for anyone managing a social media account. So essentially every newsroom.
He’s dived into the regular data released by Facebook about what’s actually in people’s timelines these days. Interesting bits are…
Facebook group posts are solid as a rock. These still need to be a bedrock of a distribution strategy. And there’s a group for pretty much all geographic/topic-based interests. And if you find niches which aren’t existing or have a community, then it’d still be worth creating one so you have control of the space.
Content from non-followers is more prominent again. There was a period where you would only see content shared by friends/family or pages you followed or groups you were in. But it looks like Facebook was becoming too narrow. Dan summarises this is likely in response to TikTok’s ‘For You’ becoming so popular as it draws in content based on interest/previous engagement.
Multimedia content continues to out-perform, status posts, pictures, video, reels, stories. You name it, the more visual the greater prominence and cut-through it’s going to get.
Lots of people still use Facebook. Two-thirds of the UK population remain very active on the platform.
The return of The Parched Pea Podcast
If you’ll forgive the plug, one of my most popular posts last year was when I penned a piece about the community-focused podcast series we created with Blog Preston alongside the Lancashire Post. I think it caught the eye because it was local media working together - ably helped by two budding journalists-in-training from the University of Central Lancashire’s journalism school too.
This year we’re bringing the Parched Pea Podcast back for a second series, with Gilly still behind the microphone, and also joined forces with independent commercial radio station Central Radio too.
You can hear the series two trailer and listen back to series one too.
The tips and hints from last series remain true, I think, and I’ll share more once this series is out there in the world during Spring this year.
It’s been fantastic to see the collaboration continuing, and expanding. Thanks to all those involved in helping making it happen, directly or indirectly.
For me, podcasts are often becoming the preserve of social media influencers or big-spending celebs or production houses, it’s important there’s a grassroots of podcasts maintained which bring the stories of real people to the virtual airwaves.
That’s all for this week’s digest, I hope as always you’ve found it useful and insightful. If there’s something you think I should be featuring then drop me a line at ed@almaonline.co.uk
The rest of this week sees me heading to Convention of the North on Friday (helpfully and rightly in Preston) so be interesting to see which topics are bubbling up there amongst the political chattering classes.
Have a great rest of the week. Keep going.
Ed