Adam Gostomelsky is a senior at Carmel High School. His AP Research project has been to investigate the analytics of Carmel High School's HiLite website and social media. These are his findings and recommendations.

1. IMPROVEMENTS FOR ONLINE
COVERAGE IN HILITE
ADAM GOSTOMELSKY
CARMEL HS, CARMEL, IND.

2. KEY POINTS
• This is to make all of us better
• Readers online leave a footprint – we no longer have to guesstimate on what
they saw, read, or heard

3. SOCIAL MEDIA
• 81% of Americans get at least some of their news through websites, apps, or social
networking
• 65% of US adults said they learned about the election in the past week from digital
sources: 48% from news sites or apps and 44% from social networking sites (June
2016)
• However, in October 2012, only 17% of US adults said they regularly turned to any
social media platforms for campaign news and just 36% said they turned to internet
sources in general

4. DOES HILITE HAVE A
FACEBOOK PAGE?
Yes.

5. WHEN WAS THE LAST POST ON OUR FACEBOOK PAGE?
March 15, 2016

6. FACEBOOK
• Facebook is the biggest driver of news
• 66% of Facebook users get news on site
• 78% get news on Facebook because they see it when they
are there for other reasons
• Facebook comprises 82% and 84% of total social media
traffic to long and short form news stories, respectively

7. Facebook is the biggest driver of
OUR MEDIA

8. Website Referrals – like clicking
on a hyperlink
Accounted for 13% of all
traffic to HiLite website

9. Of all social media traffic to the HiLite website, Facebook accounts for 89%

10. TWITTER
• 59% of Twitter users get news on
site
• Twitter users spend more time
engaged with news content

11. TWITTER IMPROVEMENTS
• We need to tweet more of our content out
• Rt’s are great, but BALANCE is key
• Creative tweets – like the mannequin
challenge
• Be creative with headline leads

12. HEADLINE WRITING
• Clickbait does NOT work
• Headlines that use demonstrative adjectives like
“this” “that” and “those” showed significantly higher
click through rates
• Longer headlines beat shorter headlines
• Headlines that contain direct quotes were 14% more
likely to win a headline test
“GOP debate this evening”

13. ONLINE CONTENT
• Online TOC
• Long form vs. short form content

14. ONLINE TOC
• Readers need to know that it exists
• Readers need to know what kind of content they can find
• Allows for cohesiveness between print and online

15. LONG FORM IS GREAT
• On cell phones, long form articles get more than twice the engaged time of
short form (123 vs 57 sec)
• 76% of about 75,000 articles studied were short-form, but article for article,
long form stories attract visitors at nearly the same rate as short-form: 1,530
vs. 1,576
• Does NOT mean readers want more long form (not many know word count
before clicking on link), but rather that they still find their way to them
• Stories longer than 1,200 words got 23% more engagement, 45% more
social referrals and 11% percent more page views.

16. SOCIAL MEDIA EDITORS
• Responsible for setting people up to cover certain events
• Great for snapchat, twitter live feed
• Think about different little events – Ex. Stat Carnival: Instagram and snapchat
• Tweet out old content

17. TWEETING OUT OLD CONTENT
• Example: Conner Coghlan
• Possible future examples:
• Staff editorial on student journalism
• Awards!

18. SECTION EDITORS AND MANAGEMENT
• Pay attention to when your stories are promoted
• People spend the greatest amount of time when introduced through an internal
link
• Post creative, experimental things online – like video
• Enterprise stories!
• Search Engine Optimization – the Conner Coghlan article was on the third
page of google