My Tuesday blog post about the value of archival photos for Facebook engagement caught the attention of Allen Klosowski, Digital First Media’s senior director, social media and mobile.
Allen, who is based in Denver, called my suggestion to the attention of his colleagues Eric Lubbers and Dan Petty in the Denver Post newsroom. “They ran with it, and it’s now going to be a standard feature,” Allen said in an email. “Nice engagement and it seemed to boost the post that came up next.”
The photo above, as you can see, got lots of shares and likes. (It also got more than 40 comments, but I can’t show them all in a screen grab.)
I think the short, pithy questions that Maryanne MacLeod of the Macomb Daily uses with some of her archival photos (below) tend to get stronger engagement. But I also like the idea of inviting people to click for more old photos on your website. I’d like to see how it works if someone combines the two techniques. This much is clear: Remember-when photos are an effective engagement tool. Please let me know how your newsroom is using them and what works well (or doesn’t work) for you.
Update: Susan Steade of the San Jose Mercury News sends along some more experience with photo archives (edited from two emails):
We started compiling archival slideshows at MercuryNews.com last summer, and now have a collection of them. The favorite so far, on the defunct amusement park Frontier Village, has gotten about 26,000 page views. Beauty queens; bars, taverns and discos; and cheerleaders and twirlers have each gotten 12,000-15,000 so far.
The slideshows have an article template that displays links to the previous collections. In a month or so we’ll be adding favorite “remember when” stories to the section.
I don’t think they’ve been getting much play on Facebook. We do have a Pinterest board for the archival photos, though, and we’ve been tweeting them out.
Source: mercurynews.com via San Jose Mercury News on Pinterest
That’s Halle Berry at age 20 in a Miss World pageant from the Merc’s Archive Photos Pinboard.
Early responses on Twitter:
@stevebuttry we mine 168 years of archives for old photos all the time, both on main site and on a dedicated “Anecdoted from Archives” blog
— Bora Zivkovic (@BoraZ) February 28, 2013
@stevebuttry here’s a recent one: bit.ly/XIFmAN and the blog (about to re-start): bit.ly/XIFq3F
— Bora Zivkovic (@BoraZ) February 28, 2013
@stevebuttry Great blog post. At @ledgerenquirer, we use remember-when photos for “Throwback Thursday” trivia on Facebook.
— Sonya Sorich (@ssorich) February 28, 2013
More strong engagement on remember-when photos ow.ly/i8kTN I couldn’t agree more, images drive Likes and comments @stevebuttry
— Val Hoeppner (@vhoeppner) February 28, 2013
The Buttry Diary 
Yes, use of archival images (and stories) are an engagement builder, not just on Facebook and website but in print as well. BUT, what does this tell us? Do we see more engagement with this material because it resonates with our aging readership base? Does publishing too much of this help to further alienate younger readers? Would it be smart to peel off the nostalgia stuff into a channel that is completely separate from current news? Would it be equally smart to create new channels with edgier current content to appeal to younger age groups, or other special interests? These could all be cross-promoted of course. IOW, for example, should the Macomb daily create a separate FB page called Macomb Yesteryear, and another one called Macomb Under Thirty? Or to go further, Macomb LGBT, Macomb Rocks, Macomb Sports, Macomb Foodies. Think community membership models for news. Build membership hooks for every interest group in your community, not just the old-timers who like to remember when.
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Excellent points, Martin. But nostalgia is not fun just for us old farts. I recently saw an engagement project featuring music from “before you were born.” The songs were from the ’80s and a crowd much younger than me was enjoying the engagement.
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I think Martin raises some good questions here. First, Steve, your post was well-timed. The photo department had just started this archive project after we recently finished digitizing hundreds of thousands of our old photos, now in a searchable archive in-house, also available for search on GettyImages.com here: http://bit.ly/YCL86d Our team wanted to find a way to promote it. I think history is timeless, and enough people find it interesting because it offers perspective for younger readers, evokes nostalgia for other readers, and ultimately leads to terrific engagement, especially if you can show a landmark/place that young people know now, and the older generation remembers when.
And I’ve never been a huge fan of starting separate Facebook pages because it fragments your audience too much, and we have to consider the reality of maintaining dozens of Facebook pages as a team. There comes a point where it isn’t worth it. You might be able to argue that this generalist approach is part of what got newspapers in trouble in the first place, but I still think you can make a bigger impact with an occasional post like this on your largest page than separating it out into a totally different page. Ultimately, we want readers to see the other archive photos we have on our website — the ones not posted on Facebook. We separate Facebook pages out by topic: Sports, entertainment, general (news, our largest), travel, prep sports, music/Reverb, Lifestyles and several others. Some fragmentation is good; just not too much.
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