Webinar Replay: Nextdoor for Local News – Expanding Your Community Reach

Transcript:

Sarah Loyd: Welcome again to today’s webinar, Nextdoor for Local News, expanding Your Community Reach. Today we’re gonna talk about the partnership with our neighbors of Nextdoor and the unique audience that is on Nextdoor. We’ll also talk about how that audience is responding to local news and how your newsroom can now start publishing content directly to Nextdoor to reach this hyperlocal audience. If you have questions, please drop those into the questions box today. And we will answer those at the end. And before we get started, just a little bit about us. Social News Desk is the only social media management software that’s purpose built for critical communicators.

We were founded in 2010 and since then we’ve proudly supported America’s largest news companies. Cities, government agencies, school districts, universities, and businesses who require powerful, always on social media tools. And just a little bit about me, I’m Sarah Lloyd, the head of Product Success and Evangelism here at Social News Desk.

I’ve been with the team for more than 10 years, and prior to joining SND managed social media and worked in several newsrooms. And I was actually a Social News Desk customer before I joined the team, so been around a minute and feel free to connect with me there on LinkedIn. And I’m also pleased today to welcome our guest, Jason Hwang, the Head of Content and Director of Business Development at Nextdoor.

Jason leads strategic partnerships to enhance the availability of local news and information on the platform. Prior to Nextdoor, he co-founded Hoodline, a pioneering local news and data platform, and led local TV news partnerships at YouTube, helping broadcasters expand their digital reach. And thank you so much for being with us today, Jason.

Jason Hwang: I really appreciate it. Oh, thank you. Pleasure’s mine.

Sarah Loyd: Awesome. First things first, Jason, can you tell us a little bit about what makes Nextdoor so unique?

Jason Hwang: Sure. A little bit about Nextdoor. If you haven’t used the product before there are essentially two main things that make Nextdoor unique.

First, it is a social network for your neighborhood. That means the way that content is organized and distributed around Nextdoor is very different than a interest graph or a social graph like a LinkedIn or a Twitter. Or Facebook Nextdoor, you can actually think of it as a collection of hundreds of thousands of neighborhood groups.

And so the other thing that makes Nextdoor very powerful and interesting for publishers and partners is that a hundred percent of our users that have access to the app are verified by not only their real first name and last name, but also their physical home address. So part of the registration process is have to give us your real ID and even maybe a drop of blood.

Just kidding. But we are very stringent in who is allowed to join next door. And once you’re, we verify your identity as well as your address, you can instantly reach everyone in your neighborhood. And so that makes Nextdoor very powerful for time sensitive types of information. There’s a fire and here’s where you need to evacuate, or, I lost my dog.

And also very helpful for just neighborly requests. I could use a cup of sugar. Can anyone help me in a pinch? Since I’ve been here, I’ve been at the company six years. We’ve rapidly grown. So when I first joined we had 20 million verified users. Now we have over a hundred million verified users in the United States.

That’s roughly one in three US households. We’ll have a registered Nextdoor account. We’re also a very. Sticky platform. Around half 45 million of our user base will log on to Nextdoor on a weekly basis. And as I mentioned before Nextdoor is like a collection of neighborhood groups and we have over 340,000 neighborhood groups on Nextdoor alone in the us, Canada, and the uk.

 And the next question you may be asking is who? Goes through the verification process. Who would download Nextdoor? And what I like to think of is Nextdoor’s audience. And Nextdoor’s demographic is the local news demographic. People not only would download Nextdoor ’cause they want to know what’s happening in their community, but these are people who by and large are homeowners and really care about property taxes.

They care about roads, they care about schools. The vast majority of our users are also parents, right? And they’re also household decision makers. So they would be the ones that are subscribing to the local newspaper or donating to public radio. And additionally, yeah. The Nextdoor audience isn’t typically found on the other social platforms, so it’s additive what you would see.

Almost half of our users don’t use Instagram and TikTok and 20% of them don’t log onto Facebook on a monthly basis. What is interesting about, the proposition that we’ll show you in a few minutes is never before did we allow news publishers to have a page on Nextdoor and we’re a walled garden out of walled gardens, all these other platforms.

It’s super easy for any organization to create an account. Next door, not so much. We first started working with Social News Desk. About a year ago in order to allow public government agencies to have a page on next door, and that program went amazingly well. We’ve loved working with Social News Desk, and now we’re expanding that program to verified local news publishers.

This is an amazing opportunity to get additive reach. And you may be asking, okay, why now? And the there’s essentially two slides or two pieces of research that have led to this decision. And it’s a pretty big jump for us to create thousands of partnerships with publishers.

Give these publishers broad reach, instant reach where they don’t have to spin up ads to get followers. They, you have local content and you can automatically reach everyone in your geography. Why would we do that? The number one reason is because our users have been asking for it. As I mentioned in the earlier slide we’ve grown quite a bit.

We have almost a hundred million users, but, now the challenge for us is how do we get those users who come on a weekly basis to come on a daily basis? And when we ask them, what would make you come more often, they say or predominantly they say, it would be great if we just had more time sensitive content.

I signed up during Hurricane Sandy, or I signed up during Covid, or I signed up during the Palisades fire and Nextdoor was essential in order to get real time information during those. Use cases, but now the fire’s over and I don’t see that every day. It would be helpful if you had information in my feed about, school closures or crime and safety or that local bill that we should all vote on.

I want to know the context and I wanna discuss it with my neighbors. And local news publishers are the creators of that content and, it just makes sense. It’s a mutually beneficial experience to invite those creators of that content to now meet the people who want it. And we’re also not, we’re also quite aware of the landscape in our competitors quite frankly. When we first tested the addition of local news on Nextdoor in 2022, it was a very limited test. We also added the ability to socially share news links from publisher pages to Nextdoor that edition. This is a Pew research survey, by the way, from last year, that edition put next door on the map before news wasn’t even allowed in our content policy guidelines.

And so we’re seeing these green shoots where our users are wanting to do this already. They’re already engaging with these small amount of news that does get shared to the platform. And contrast that with Twitter, Facebook and Reddit. And I. Meta in general news publishers are essentially declining in reach in the, on those platforms because of maybe algorithmic changes or just they’re becoming entertainment apps now.

Nextdoor is utilitarian by nature. We’re only focusing on local, and so this makes sense to partner with local news organizations at this time. I think you guys are probably now sick of hearing the context and why we’re doing it. We’ll just jump to what it looks like and feel free to throw any questions.

I can’t really see them, but I’ll breeze through the slides of the products that we’re launching these products. Many of them have already shipped. We have around 3000 publishers that are using the pages today across the us. But the final iteration, not the final, but the go to market moment for all these features and where we hope to have a really amazing experience is in June.

So we have a little bit of time to get started.

Sweet. The first slide that I would share here is we have tested this in the first quarter of this year, we launched in seven DMAs in a 50% AB test. Maybe some of you guys on the presentation today were part of our pilot. In that test, the metrics looked amazing and that’s why we’ve shipped since then to the rest of the country.

Just very short. Callouts click through rate of publisher content in the test was extremely high. An engagement rate overall also very high. That’s why it gave us confidence that this is working for both our neighbors as well as our partners. A little bit of verbatims from some of our publishers in the DM pilot test.

This is from Embarcadero Media. One of a couple messages that we’ve gotten. And, we’re scaling pretty quickly. The few of you who have probably used or currently use Nextdoor today, the mocks that you are going to see will not look at all like the current user experience.

Essentially the tool set that publishers and customers will get are every publisher will get a page very similar process, a sign up like a Facebook page, right? The difference is that when you sign up. You tell us which geographies your publication or your page should cover. So you select counties or you select the DMA or a list of cities that automatically gets you access and reach to those areas.

Then what we also ask for at times is in our S feed, or maybe this API integration fixes that. But we do that because we want to help you help publishers automate a little bit of the posting to Nextdoor. And when we get these posts. From your page, what we’re doing in the background is analyzing the post content, trying to find relative signals that tell us, okay, this post is about this neighborhood, or this post is about that county, and then we’re organizing the content in geotargeting it on your behalf.

That’s the very basic tool set in a nutshell. But there are other things that you can do too. So on top of, logging into these pages and looking at the metrics, looking at performance looking at, who sent you a direct message you can also log into these pages and make a.

We call them manual posts because I, we don’t have a better way to describe it, but you can, use the native post feature on next o and upload a poll. You can upload videos. You can, just ask an open-ended question or reply to people’s comments. And what’s more is that you can also see a feed of what neighbors in your area are talking about.

And then. Maybe reply or ask a follow-up question and say, Hey, I wanna use your post in an upcoming article. Can I embed it in my story and can I get a quote? Stuff that I think a lot of publishers have been asking for of Nextdoor because it is some user behavior that a journalist especially will do on a Facebook or Twitter.

We now have unlocked that on Nextdoor. Yeah, and this is what I mentioned before. This is what the pages will look like. You get a badge verification badge if and I think the vast majority of publishers using Social News Desk would be pre verified. And, we encourage you once you sign up to share your pages with your audience.

And you do see this little follow button. As I mentioned before following is not required to get distribution and reach to local audiences on Nextdoor, but what it does do is, gives that user ability and you to have a DM relationship with them. And also increases the ranking of posts in their feed as well as you get push notifications and emails, like a YouTube subscription.

So if you sub subscribe to a YouTube vid channel, you’ll get push notifications every time they have a new video. So it’s the same concept.

Great. And just to recap basic learnings of what we’ve seen so far the types of content that perform best are ones that drive, engagement and dialogue and civic discussion on Nextdoor. So some topics that stand out are what we call community and society and local politics. Obviously our contact guidelines are everything must be local, but you can think about local local legislation that bans e-bikes from schools.

That will drive a lot of engagement on Nextdoor. And that dialogue it’s still a social network, so it spins the wheels of sending notifications and more comments to the neighborhood and therefore elevates the news in the ranking.

And finally before, we pass it, I pass it off back to Sarah is just summarizing the key benefits. So signing up for this program is free. It’s very easy. It’s like clicking a couple buttons like creating a Twitter account, for example. And the difference is that. Everything is pretty much automated, especially with this integration.

So you register, click a couple buttons, content starts pointing through. We automatically send your content to the right users on Nextdoor and you start building a following and you don’t start from zero. And that’s it.

Sarah Loyd: Alright, awesome. Thank you so much Jason. We are so excited about this next step in the partnership between Social News Desk and Nextdoor, and I think this is really gonna be a game changer for covering and informing local communities.

So let’s jump right in and talk about how you can get started with publishing on Nextdoor. The first thing you’ll need to do is. Choose a person in your newsroom to claim your Nextdoor news account page. So this will be the page admin basically. Next, you can go to the address on the screen, it’s Nextdoor.com/create-account.

You can screenshot this slide or you can check out our knowledge base at support.socialnewsdesk.com, where we’ll have this link as well. And that’s where you can sign up for a Nextdoor neighbor account with your work email address to admin your page. Before you get started, you’ll also want to gather up any RSS feeds with compelling local content that you can then use to set up autopilot for your new Nextdoor page.

And if you’ve already set up autopilot for another social account, we’re gonna pull those feeds in to make it super duper easy to set up. So once you’ve done those things, you’re ready to start onboarding your account in Social News Desk. You can go to the account settings section of s and d, and then click on the social accounts tab at the top.

And from there you can click on the add social account button and then choose Nextdoor from the list. Next, you’ll choose news as your account type. You’ll see that there is also an option for agency pages. Those are for government and school districts, and they work a little different than news pages.

So be sure you select news as your account type. And now it’s time to start claiming your Nextdoor for news account page. By filling out some details about your newsroom, you’ll need to enter your main website, URL, the name of your station or publication, and a brief description as you’d like it to appear on your page.

Finally, you can update a or upload a logo and you’ll be all ready to go. Now if you’ve already claimed a Nextdoor News account page, if you were part of the pilot or one of the early adopters, you can follow the same process, but you’ll really just need to enter your publication URL, so we can verify that you have a page.

Next, you’ll click save and then authenticate Social News Desk to publish content to Nextdoor, and your page will be created and claimed. Once your page is claimed, you can choose from any available RSS feeds to easily automate your Nextdoor publishing. And if you haven’t used autopilot before, you can also enter an RSS feed manually, and we’ll do the rest.

We’ll set up your schedule, we’ll set up the frequency, and now you’re ready to assign the Nextdoor account to the other users on your team and get started with publishing. Now if you have set up autopilot, you don’t necessarily need to do anything else, but you can also manually publish or schedule a link through Social News Desk using our post composer Nextdoor.

We’ll automatically pull the description of your article to display with the post. So you’ll simply add the URL of the story. Optionally, you can edit the title, description, and thumbnail of that story in Social News Desk and then publish or schedule the article just like any other post in s and d. And in addition to publishing to your Nextdoor News account page, you can also discover what neighbors and agencies are saying with our search and listen tools.

The Nextdoor keyword search tool allows you to enter any location or you can use your current location, and then set a radius from one mile to 100 miles and enter a keyword to see what neighbors are saying about that topic. And here’s a little pro tip. You can enter a space in the keyword field and you’ll see all the content within that radius.

The city feed will aggregate all neighbors posts within city limits for a particular location. You’ll select the state and then enter the city name, and you can also sort content by latest posts like we have here, or by most liked posts within a certain timeframe. The Nextdoor Agency feed allows you to follow all agencies within any state, or you can use the search tool to select only certain agencies like your city or county’s law enforcement, fire departments, or utilities for a customized experience.

And finally, the Nextdoor State feed will show content from both agencies and neighbors across the entire state. So this is a great feed to keep open on your dashboard to quickly keep tabs on what’s happening in other communities. Nextdoor Content Surface using Search and Listen can also be used to power SND on air playlists that you can feature in a broadcast, a live stream or other display.

You can share both crime prevention tips from agencies. And tips from neighbors in the same display. In this example, several neighborhoods in Seattle were experiencing a rash of purse and phone thefts, and several neighbors reported it happening to them at various locations. Neighbors also post all kinds of photos to next door, including great photos of the weather, nature, and the other things that make their neighborhoods unique.

And this is a look at our waterfall layout for SND on air, which gives you a beautiful way to showcase a lot of content at one time. So to recap, Social News Desk and Nextdoor now allow you to publish schedule and automate news content directly to the platform. Use search and listen to discover content from neighbors and agencies, and showcase Nextdoor content on TV using s and d on air.

So now we’re gonna take a few minutes to go through some questions and we do have some questions that came in. I also see, and nevermind you just answered it, which is always great. Alright, so Jason, this first question is for you. How does Nextdoor decide which stories to feature?

Jason Hwang: Yeah, great question.

I will tell you the exact tenets of the algorithm. And it’s it’s very simply, we, you can think of Nextdoor distribution. There’s two, there’s essentially, there’s two components. There’s whether you get distributed to the neighborhood feed, so somebody’s neighborhood feed, for example.

And then the ranking. And so you can think of it as like a filter and a sort. Everything in the newsfeed is on the spreadsheet. And whether you get filtered in there and sorted is your ranking. So on the filter component it’s. Not that it’s not that complicated. It’s basically based on locality.

So if we detect that this article is relevant to this neighborhood, it’s relevant to this city, it’s relevant to this county, then it can be in that bucket to be shown to everyone in that geographic area. And that goes for local news posts, but public agency posts as well. The, so that’s just determines whether it can be shown.

The ranking is complicated, but the components are essentially time sensitivity. So is this like a urgent piece of information that will decay if we don’t show it to users within the next 12 hours or whatever? So there’s a recency component, there’s a engagement component. If we show it to, a thousand people. What is the relative what is the predictive algorithm that the next thousand people we show it to will also want to engage with it? That’s just how the state of social media ranking works today. And then the third is essentially personal preferences.

So if you follow the account or if every day you engage with food and nightlife posts on Nextdoor, and this is a food and nightlife post, we will try to show you that thing that you like. That’s the algorithm in a nutshell.

Sarah Loyd: I really like how you said a filter and then a sort, so geographic filter to make sure that’s gonna be locally relevant and then sorting based on content preferences, whether or not they follow you and whether or not other people are also engaging with it.

Jason Hwang: Yep, that’s right.

Sarah Loyd: All right. So here’s another question for you. Is it better to manually publish select articles that we think will perform well instead of bombarding people with every news story that we do?

Jason Hwang: Great question. I think it depends on, it depends on a couple factors, right? Right now if you, I. Since Nextdoor is a very different beast than other platforms since we’re so fixed on geography. There are some DMAs that are highly competitive with both publishers, ex publishers on the platform, public agencies on the platform and users on the platform.

So take a city like San Francisco. The feed is very dense. A lot of people are posting all sorts of stuff. We also have very active police, fire, emergency service that are also active. We also have, two dozen or three dozen news publishers in the seven by seven grid of San Francisco alone.

Given that it’s so competitive really it’s like the best of the best will get shown. So it’s gotta be hyperlocal, it’s gotta be really engaging, like a very good social video does very well. Content that, is of topics that are like, generate a lot of engagement and discussion.

Those do well. So it’s like a winner takes all little bit in highly competitive markets. However, you go out just an hour north of the city of San Francisco to where I live, for example Marin County. It is, there is a lot of users there, but there’s very low competition in terms of like publishers, public agencies.

There, there’s also maybe even less user generated content based on per, square foot.

Sarah Loyd: Yeah. It’s just your size of population.

Jason Hwang: That’s right. And so in those areas. The more content, the better that it’s local.

You can think of it like a bucket of water. If there’s just, if you fill up the whole bucket and it’s just all the rest of your posts, that’s a good thing.

Sarah Loyd: All right. So it sounds like in, in those less competitive markets, this is, probably gonna be really beneficial for, really all of our customers, but especially our smaller newsrooms who are looking for a better way to engage with their local communities.

And for our larger newsrooms, they may wanna be a little bit more selective in the content they publish, it sounds like.

Jason Hwang: Yeah, I think so. Okay. You can always, so the vast majority of publishers today, they just they’re letting the spaghetti hit the wall and they’re looking at the metrics and trying to figure out like the learnings on their own.

And that is perfectly acceptable strategy as well. Since a lot of this is also automated.

Sarah Loyd: Yep. Okay. That’s great. So we have a question. We previously set up a Nextdoor account using the newsroom email. We didn’t do anything with it. As far as posting content goes, can I use that existing account or do I need to start over?

You should be able to use that existing account. Just make sure you’re logged in with that newsroom account when you go through the onboarding process and Social News Desk and enter the same publication URL, and you should be able to onboard that page into SND. And if you have, al already set up an RSS feed directly with Nextdoor.

You may or may not want to set up autopilot as well. You, I would probably pick one or the other. But you can still publish those posts through post Composer. So if there’s something a little more time sensitive that you need to get out the door quickly, you can definitely use Social News Desk to push that out.

All right, let’s see. Is it important to include specific neighborhood or community in the headline in order for it to catch the eyes of the algorithm?

Jason Hwang: Yeah. It helps. It helps. So what we do is, it’s, we essentially just part parse the text and the title, description and body of the article itself.

Most often. In order to get the best signal for whether this piece of content is locally relevant to this neighborhood or this school district or whatever, we are looking at the body of the article. Because often in, in the story it’ll mention, I. So and had this incident at 21st and Bryant Street.

Or, you’ll mention a bunch of communities in school districts in the body itself, and that helps a lot. But it does, work a little bit like page rank for SEO, right? Where if you talk about this street corner in the title. Probably it’s very relevant to people who live right around that street corner.

Sarah Loyd: Yeah, that makes sense. And I can tell you also on the backend of Social News Desk, we are also passing the content of the article to Nextdoor. So they do have that signal also. So they’re not just looking at the title and description when we pass those through. Alright if we set up our page as a business page originally connected to an employee’s account, can we still use it?

When I try to connect SND, just sort of spins and never connects. Amy, that’s a great question. If you don’t mind sending an email to support@socialnewsdesk.com, we can help you get that sorted out.

Jason Hwang: Yeah, unfortunately business pages are not the right account for this, so business pages. I don’t wanna poop on the business page team, but this page accounts do not really have the abilities that these news pages do.

The primary use case for a business page is to show up when neighbors search for businesses in our business index and then to buy ads. That’s basically it. You can’t do anything else. And if you want to have the ability to post and reach more people and use this integration, you want to have a news page account.

So they should go through that page claim process and possibly with a new account. But you should be able to claim your publication if you haven’t claimed one already. Yeah. You probably want to disable the new business page. You can still use that email, but you like, you wanna disable that business page account, unlink it, maybe. And then you can request a news page account through SND or through this website. So if you go to https://nextdoor.com/news_account, you can request news accounts through there. The integration with Social News Desk is so that you essentially through the API applying for pages using the same website, but it’s just like in the background. So either way, which works or contact and we’ll walk you through it.

Sarah Loyd: Yeah. Yep, for sure. All right. Will there be any analytics inside s and d and is Nextdoor passing along data to other data collection partners such as Parse.ly?

So at this time we don’t have analytics inside Social News Desk that’s not part of this first round of the API. I’ll let Jason speak to whether or not there are plans for that.

Jason Hwang: Yes, there are plans underway. So it’s all part of the roadmap. We understand that we wanna have a really good feedback loop, right? And publishers will use Social News Desk to understand like, oh, this topic is working really well. It’s trending on Nextdoor, let me do more of it. Or this. Specific geography is, or this specific page is trending.

Let’s, be strategic in how we outreach. And you can’t do that without analytics. And so we’re gonna try to enable that very fast follow.

Sarah Loyd: Awesome. Yeah. And as soon as that’s available, we’ll definitely be jumping on it on our side of things as well. All right. Let’s see, we answered that question.

Sorry, we have a lot of questions here and I, but there’s a lot of kind of themes. Let’s see.

Alright. Is it fair to say that you suggest news outlets keep news content shared on Nextdoor specific to local news? What about consumer news that’s not necessarily local?

Jason Hwang: Yeah, so part of our contents guidelines for not just news publishers, but all users of the platform, is that it has to be local.

It has to be local to the geography in which you’re posting that post to. Otherwise actually it will get moderated. So we are like a Reddit where people in the community neighbors are volunteer moderators and they enforce the community guidelines and the guide. There’s other guidelines being civil, et cetera.

But the one. Very unique guideline to Nextdoor that you won’t see on Facebook, for example, is that we don’t allow you to post stuff about, Tesla or the war on Gaza, or, just general, like tech news, for example. It’s, it has to be relevant and local to the community itself.

Sarah Loyd: Gotcha. That makes sense. All right. If we’re already set up with an RSS feed to Nextdoor, is there a way to turn that off when we set it up in SND? Yeah, I think that’s a question for you.

Jason Hwang: Yeah. Okay. So they would go into their business or their sorry, their page account settings. You would contact us today if that’s probably the quickest way.

You can email newshelp@nextdoor.com. And you can CC me as well. I’m jason@nextdoor.com.

So you would say, Hey, my page is, or my account is this this is my feed that I’d like to disable because I am integrating with Social News Desk. And then we will, everyone will have the context on the other end and we’ll take care of it. Alright. And we had another question about disabling business accounts.

Sarah Loyd: If they need help disabling that, can they email that news, help email as well?

Jason Hwang: Yes.

Sarah Loyd: Okay, perfect. Alright last question. Will a recording of this webinar be available or a copy of the deck? So we don’t usually make the deck available, but we will have this up on socialnewsdesk.com. I’m gonna try to get it up as soon as possible.

So it may be this afternoon. It may be tomorrow. But watch this space. We’ll also be sending out an email to everyone who registered with that recording as well as a guest blog post from Nextdoor. So be on the lookout for that as well. All right. I think that’s all the questions that we had.

If I did not answer your question, I apologize. There was a long list and a lot of similar topics. Feel free to email support@socialnewsdesk.com if you need additional help. That will get to our entire client success team and your client success manager will reach out to give you a hand with setting that up.

This should be all turned on and ready to go for you guys. We do have information in our knowledge base at support.socialnewsdesk.com on that onboarding process as well as how to publish to Nextdoor. Thank you guys so much Jason. Thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate your time today and we’ll see you guys soon.

Jason Hwang: Thanks so much.

Sarah Loyd: Thank you.