Sep 20, 2018
Recently, an industry website called The Drum reported that The Financial Times, the London-based business publication, is projected to hit 1 million paying digital subscribers by next year. This is impressive, not just because only a handful of publications have hit this milestone, but also because The Financial Times has done so while maintaining a hard paywall.
Unlike companies that use metered paywalls like The New York Times and Washington Post, The Financial Times hits users with a subscriber login page on the vast majority of its articles. This presents a challenge for a social media editor: how do you promote content when most of your followers won’t be able to see it?
To get an overview of The Financial Times’ social media strategy, I interviewed Jake Grovum, its head of social. He told me about how the Times’ has leveraged Instagram stories, what metrics his team is judged by, and why the newspaper hasn’t invested resources into Snapchat.