audience engagement

The old ways of attracting audiences are failing. Traffic from social is falling for many publications, and search is changing fast — and AI is only likely to accelerate that. This completely reworked four-week course will guide you through creating an integrated audience engagement strategy that works for your target audience, which works across platforms, but, critically, also helps you build and deepen direct relationships with your readers.

We’ll cover the major reader and listener acquisition sources — including the latest changes in search and social media — as well as ways of engaging more directly with your potential audience through tools like newsletters, podcasts and more. We’ll also explore the risks of depending entirely on social and search, and the new opportunities opening up in more direct approaches.

Not only that, but we’ll also consider how to account for business models in your planning, as well as how to shift your strategy over time based on results and feedback. We’ll explore examples from various publications, and spend some time in workshops applying those lessons to your own site’s strategies and objectives.

This intensive course in creating, planning and executing an audience engagement strategy is led by Adam Tinworth, a lecturer in audience engagement and social media at City, University of London. His students have gone on to senior audience engagement roles at The Telegraph, Mail Online, Metro, The Guardian, The Financial Times, The Manchester Evening News, The Sun, and the World Economic Forum.

The course will:

  • provide the latest thinking in audience development;
  • provide guidance on both the psychological and technological underpinning for different strategies;
  • deepen your understanding of when and how to use social and search;
  • explore new avenues for audience development, as well as neglected older ones;
  • look at how different segments of your audience can be addressed individually;
  • explore the more direct — and owned — relationships you can have with your readers;
  • provide space and time to start planning your own strategy, and
  • give you access to ongoing updated resources online, extending the life of the course beyond the four sessions on Zoom.

Getting there

This course will take place online over five 90-minute Zoom sessions on Thursday 26th June, Thursday 3rd July, Thursday 10th July, Thursday 17th July and Thursday 24th July. Start and end times of each session will be confirmed in an email the week before the course starts, but will most likely be 1pm - 2.30pm GMT.


About Adam Tinworth

Adam Tinworth has more than five years' experience in training journalists in social media, SEO and digital journalism.

A journalist for 20 years and a blogger for 10, Adam now works as a consultant and trainer in digital journalism, social media and content strategy.

He is a visiting lecturer at City University on the journalism MA course.