Hearst Digital Media's #1 CrowdTangle Pro Tip

Senior Content Strategist & self-described CT superfan Megan Lasher shares her learnings for scaling CrowdTangle across the newsroom.

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Written by Tess
Updated over a week ago

I'm Megan Lasher, senior content strategy manager at Hearst Digital Media.

So Hearst Digital Media owns about 26 digital magazines, things like Cosmopolitan, Esquire, ELLE, Harper's Bazaar and Good Houskeeping.

I think CrowdTangle is a really awesome tool for a team like mine which is centralized across a lot of brands. It makes it really easy to hone in on certain topics that all of our brands find useful.

What's your best pro tip?

What Hearst finds really useful is the Slack integration and just being able to create our own Slack rooms around CrowdTangle content. For a lot of our editors their lives are just so fast-paced they don't have time to log into the dashboard, so setting them up on email alerts and having them join the Slack room is really helpful. 

My pro tip for that is to have everybody make Slack rooms that start with "ct_". We have over 70 channels now on Slack that start with "ct_" and people can search that and then find the Slack room that they should be part of. We have one for the Kardashians, one for all of our food content, one that's fashion and luxury. So when somebody joins — let's say we have a new social editor at Cosmopolitan — they can easily search within Slack and follow a bunch of different channels. They don't have to create it themselves, and it's easy to find because they're all named similarly.

What do you love most?

What I love the most about CrowdTangle is actually Historical Data because it's just the easiest way to download a bunch of data at once. And from an analyst perspective, especially when I work across so many brands, and everybody has so much going on, it just makes it really easy to put things in a pivot table; the fact that it's right into Excel. There's just nothing like it.

What do you use it for?

One of the biggest things that we use HIstorical Data for is understanding where a link was coming from. Something that Hearst has really been pushing a lot lately is just having our brands share each other's content. And we also have just always had partnerships with other brands, so let's say Town & Country has a partnership with A&E Network, it's really easy in historical data because you guys give us three different types of links to Facebook.com. You give us the published one to Facebook.com, the shortened one and then the original link. We can easily sort out when Town & Country is posting an A&E link vs. when they're  sharing their own link. So historical data really helped us understand how frequently our brands were posting each others content, and then which brands weren't picking up the slack and posting each other's content. We knew who our biggest players were in terms of who was really sharing across the network and we could kind of figure out how to apply their workflow to other brands, so that all of our brands are kind of helping each other out and boosting each other's content on Facebook.

I'm a CrowdTangle superfan!

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