Earlier this year, BuzzFeed opened up a UK office in London, headed up by Luke Lewis, former editor of NME.com. The UK team has gone from strength to strength: each week there seems to be a new addition to the team, be it political editors or new reporters. Sophie Warnes caught up with Luke for a chat about BuzzFeed’s content and social media strategy, and its strengths and weaknesses.
Why do you think BuzzFeed has struck a chord with people right now – why do you think it’s so popular?
“I really think it’s a question of focusing on a new way in which people find their content, which is via social media. Before, a lot of new publishers were very much focused on trying to get stuff at the top of Google search results. A lot of people were producing very similar content, and it was about getting all the key words in the headline, and it was quite uncreative.
“Then BuzzFeed came along and just didn’t really worry about SEO. It was more about creating articles that people would want to share on social media. So immediately that kind of fostered a slightly different approach to publishing – headlines could be looser and friendlier and more expressive.
“And the other thing is, we have this business model, which means we don’t have to drive millions and millions of page views – we don’t run any display advertising. And when you don’t run display advertising it means that the user experience is much nicer, because you don’t force people into these massive multi-page galleries, there aren’t any pop-ups, there aren’t any banner-ads. You get a cleaner-looking page. So, for those reasons, you end up with a website that is easy on the eye, user-friendly, and is geared up for social sharing.”
You said that BuzzFeed is very social-led. Does everything go straight on to social media or is there content that you leave on the homepage to do well in terms of click-throughs?
“Some stuff goes better than others obviously. Celebrity coverage, for example, tends to perform very well on the home page, because many people read it if they’re curious, but it actually tends not to share fantastically well – whereas content, if it starts to pick up on Facebook or Twitter, can go crazy if you look at the viral stats, but from the homepage might not get much pick-up. So it definitely varies.”
With regards to content strategy, how do you decide what goes on, when it goes on, where it goes on the site, that sort of thing?
“At the moment in the UK we produce probably around 20, 25 posts a day, so actually it all goes on the home page – we don’t have to worry about that too much. In the US there’s more of a queuing system – they produce 200+ articles a day, so there’s someone who works there full-time queuing stuff and making sure content is visible, but there’s a lot of stuff they produce that doesn’t ever see the home page. In the UK everything goes on the home page.”
It seems like that’s quite an experimental way of going about producing content. What have you learned from working like this – are there certain topics that you definitely can’t touch, or subjects that are always guaranteed to do well?
“Not really. You’re learning all the time. One thing that we’ve struggled with, I would say, is sports coverage. We’ve written about football a few times, and every time, it’s kind of bombed. So we don’t know if that’s just because football fans haven’t found it, if it’s not the right kind of content or it needs to be better. That’s one thing that we’ve puzzled over a bit.”
Is there any ongoing strategy in terms of the kind of things that you’ll write or the avenues that you’ll go down or is it more casual?
“Here, we’re quite lucky in that you come in in the morning and you write what you want. There are different sections within BuzzFeed, so there’s a celebrity editor, and it’s her job to focus on celebrity stuff, and there’s an entertainment editor, and he mostly thinks about TV, but there are a whole bunch of people who work for BuzzFeed who really don’t have a content area that they have to focus on.
“It’s just a question of what can you write that day that will be widely shared. And often, we try and think about things that will be funny – that seems to work for us.”
This is the first part of a two-part interview with Luke. Read the second part, where Luke talks international ambition, and explains more about how BuzzFeed makes its money.