Attention everyone! How to cut through with your communication

We’re all overwhelmed online — both users who are constantly bombarded with information, and producers who need to manage and sustain an endless number of profiles and pages. So how can campaigners produce good quality content that gets people’s attention? ECDA hosted a tech session and demo about IMPRION, a tool that could be your next secret weapon for communication that hits home. 

In the forecasts of trends and developments in the world of digital communications and media for the year ahead, one point keeps coming back: it’s harder than ever to get and maintain people’s attention. And it’s going to keep getting harder.

To make sense of this landscape where attention has become such a precious resource, we often hear about the “attention economy”. People’s attention is scarcer than ever and has become the object of fierce competition – leading some to even diagnose an “attention crisis”. This new context has huge implications for campaigners across the political and civil society sphere.

Challenge accepted?

It’s vital to bring audiences the right message in the right format, at the right time. We know people make up their minds quickly about whether to stay with a post or scroll past — in a matter of milliseconds — so it’s essential to overcome the blockages and filters that turn users off some content. 

There’s evidence users want to slow down and be more intentional about their consumption of information on digital platforms, and this makes these decisions all the more crucial. 

Information is power

So what makes a good post? Quite simply: One that creates engagement. This means that beyond impressions and reach, it’s content that generates a lot of shares, comments, and likes — all evidence that the message resonates with people. 

And to measure that — we need data. We need to know how well our posts are performing and why. Some posts on a topic might take off while others on the same topic fall flat, so we need to monitor across different post types, formats, platforms, timing, and so on. 

But these numbers alone are not enough — what we do with them matters even more. To make the right calls, we also need to set clear criteria, priorities, and KPIs (key performance indicators). If something works, stick with it until it stops working, if it doesn’t work — drop it. 

Crack the code on your data — with a helping hand

Looking at analytics reports can sometimes be confusing — it’s often hard to know what numbers to focus on and which to discard. But there are tools out there designed to make this process much more straightforward. 

One of them is Imprion — an automated social analytics tool that draws data from Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.

It uses a customizable scoring system that sorts posts according to topic, platform and type, and crucially — how many people clicked and shared. Using this data, it creates a quality score. This allows for comparing the performance of different posts and ranking them.

Imprion's main interface

The data collected helps you identify the topics and types of post that work best. In this way, you can determine what to post about, how and when, (as well as what not to post about!) And with an expert eye, the data can also be used as the basis for a full audit or setting benchmarks for future campaigns.

Imprion has automatic and unlimited tagging for the posts based on built-in and custom prompts, as well tone and sentiment — and the tool also transcribes videos.

Better still, this is a tool developed by and created for progressives. So what are you waiting for?

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For more information about how it all works, watch our recent tech session on Imprion.

Featured image from CANVA

Blog post licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0