Syndicated content in media is something we're all familiar with in the media monitoring world. It can, however, be difficult to identify when or why articles have been syndicated.
In order to help you make sense of syndications, we've compiled a guide outlining how syndications work across all Media Types on the Streem Platform so you can get the most out of them for your organisation.
What’s in this article:
- What is syndication in media?
- Difference between content syndication and broadcast syndication
- How does syndication work?
- What are the benefits of content syndication?
- How can you use content syndication for business growth?
- What are the drawbacks of content syndication?
- Key takeaways
- Content syndication on Streem
What is Content Syndication in Media?
Syndication allows broadcast or published media to be spread across a range of media outlets by sharing the rights to a story. For example, rather than having 20 different journalists across 20 different newspapers write the same story about a global event, syndication allows a single journalist to prepare content for this story and share it broadly across a network of different newspapers.
Print and broadcast syndicates have enabled media to become much more widespread and accessible to audiences giving journalists further reach than ever before.
In the past, syndication was restricted to a few individual features being shared among select publications. Nowadays, large media conglomerates own numerous publications, allowing stories to be syndicated extensively across print, online, and broadcast platforms.
Types of Content Syndication
- Print Syndication: Articles, columns, comics, and opinion pieces are distributed among newspapers, magazines, and online outlets.
- Broadcast Syndication: TV shows, radio programs, and news media shared across multiple media outlets or stations.
- Online Content Syndication: Blog posts, articles, and infographics shared on third-party websites to enhance visibility and generate backlinks.
You can syndicate great content by creating top-notch, shareable articles, blogs, or videos and pitching them to the relevant third-party content syndication platforms, media outlets or content distribution networks.
Free vs Paid Content Syndication
Free content syndication means sharing it on networks such as Medium, LinkedIn, and all other industry-based blogs without incurring a cost. Pitching content to these partner sites or guest posting to their sites helps earn valuable backlinks, gain visibility for the brand, and ultimately drive referral traffic to websites.
Paid content syndication, simply put, is when you need to pay to be published. It is possible with tools like Outbrain or Taboola to distribute the same content among different targeted audiences. This will allow for more control over reach, visibility, and audience segmentation, which makes it a strategic option for generating leads and creating brand awareness. However, search engine bots will identify these as sponsored ads, making free syndication the better choice if you’re looking to reach a broader audience and increase brand awareness.
Difference between Content Syndication and Broadcast Syndication
Content syndication refers to the practice of republishing written or visual content, such as articles, blogs, and infographics, across various third-party websites or platforms. It’s a widely used strategy for enhancing brand visibility and improving SEO.
Broadcast syndication describes the sharing of TV shows, radio programs, and video content across different broadcast networks. Broadcast syndication can be categorized as "first-run" (original programs airing on multiple networks) or "off-network" (reruns of TV shows being shown on different channels).
While content syndication is primarily focused on online reach, broadcast syndication mainly targets traditional media like TV and radio.
How Does Content Syndication Work?
Syndication operates through a structured process to ensure that content is disseminated across multiple platforms. Here’s a step-by-step overview of how it works:
1. Identify your goals and audienceEstablishing your objectives for syndication, whether it's going to be purely brand awareness, lead generation, search engine optimization or increased traffic. This will define your audience and select platforms that are right for them.
2. Content Syndication Partners
Select those sites and partners where your content marketing efforts will have the highest payoff. This can be through paid syndication or free. Choose what's right for your target audience.
3. Create Quality Content for Sharing
Develop original, engaging, and value-adding content for your target audience. Consider evergreen topics, how-to guides, or insights into the industry that are ripe for republishing by such platforms. Make it appealing with images, infographics, or videos.
4. Make Use of SEO Best Practices
Optimise with the aid of relevant and appropriate keywords and make proper use of meta tags and internal links. Canonical tags should be applied to signal the original source of your content, thus ensuring search engines will recognize it as the primary one - all to avoid duplicate content issues.
5. Pitch Syndication Partners:
Approach industry blogs, media networks, or even third-party platforms with a one-pager pitch on republishing your content. The content is shared with multiple media outlets (TV networks, newspapers, websites) in line with the syndication agreement.
6. Leverage Syndication Tools and Networks
Use paid content distribution platforms for the automated syndication of your content. These enable the targeting of specific audiences and monitoring of campaign performance. Each media outlet republishes the content, either in its original form or with slight modifications.
7. Performance Tracking and Measuring
Track the outcome of your content syndication efforts through the available tools and monitor the performance of syndicated content. Tools like Streem help identify syndicated versions of the content and monitor their performance.
What are the Benefits of Media Syndication?
- Increased Reach and Audience Exposure: Syndication guarantees expanding your reach by making your content known to a wider audience. Increased reach means better visibility and increased brand awareness.
- Brand Building and Authority Establishment: By appearing across multiple reputable media outlets, your brand gains authority and credibility, thereby significantly increasing brand recognition.
- Business Growth: Content syndication enables business growth by increasing brand visibility, driving website traffic, and generating leads. It helps businesses reach out to a new, broader audience while improving SEO performance and building credibility. This amplifies reach, converts the audience to potential customers, and helps with lead nurturing all the way to conversion and income generation.
- Revenue Generation: In addition, content authors can sell their works to several subscribers, which adds new income sources.
- SEO Benefits: When the original content is republished by the syndicate partners, it is done by including a backlink to the content. This contributes greatly to the SEO performance, helping it rank better and see visibility in search engines. A quick Google search may even place your brand on the first page of the results.
- Cost-Effectiveness: Content syndication offers a cost-efficient way of increasing brand recognition, as it is leveraging the existing high-quality content instead of creating new.
What are the Drawbacks of Syndicated Content?
- Loss of Control Over Content Presentation: Every brand has its unique voice, which may be altered by the way it’s presented, republished or shared by the syndicates. The fact that there is a loss of control over your own content, is the biggest challenge in syndication.
- Potential for Duplicate Content Issues: If not done correctly, the republished content on the syndicate network can be considered duplicate content by Google. This may harm the SEO strategy. Canonical tags can prevent this by showing where the original source for the content is located.
- Need for Careful Selection of Media Syndication Networks: Reputable syndicates with better reach and higher authority should be selected as syndication partners to protect both the brand image and the integrity of the content.
Media Conglomerates and Syndications
Today, syndicated content is made possible by large media groups that operate at national and global levels, owning multiple companies and creating a network of publications or broadcast networks to share and distribute content.
Across the Australian media landscape, there are a few media companies that have a large presence across print, online and broadcast media:
1. News Corp publishes national, metro and regional print and online media across the country including publications such as The Australian, The Herald Sun, The Daily Telegraph and news.com.au. As well as their print and online publications, News Corp also owns and operates Sky News Australia.2. Nine Entertainment Co not only broadcasts TV through the 9Network, they now own and publish some of the most recognised former Fairfax publications such as The Australian Financial Review, The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. Their reach is further extended to broadcast radio where they operate eight AM radio stations such as 2GB, 3AW, 4BC and 6PR.
3. Seven West Media is most notable for being one of the country’s leading broadcast TV networks, the Seven Network, however, they also publish leading publications across Western Australia including The West Australian and PerthNow. The West Australian also has a copy-sharing agreement with News Corp.
4. Australian Community Media which was previously part of the Fairfax umbrella, now comprises over 200 regional and rural publications around Australia with one of their leading publications being The Canberra Times.
When Should You Use Syndicated Content?
Syndicated content can be beneficial in many circumstances, especially if it aligns with your overall content goals. Here are a few reasons why you would consider using syndicated content, particularly with the help of Streem:
1. Optimising Reach: You can maximise your exposure by syndicating valuable content using Streem. The wider your coverage, the better it can work for you in developing your brand awareness and penetrating new markets or demographic segments without you having to reach them by yourself.2. Building on Established Authority: Syndicating authoritative or well-researched articles that work well on your site using Streem can help to make you an expert in the field as you reach out to a wider audience. This further establishes credibility, especially if there is a great following for that content in your niche.
3. Filling In Gaps on Your Content Calendar: Syndicated content can fill that gap during times when time and/or resources are not available for fresh production. Thus, it helps maintain consistency and frequency on your platforms, particularly on Streem, where continuous engagement works well.
4. Utilising Existing Content for Traffic Generation: If you have evergreen content that continually attracts visitors, syndicating on Streem could bring traffic back to your main website or platform. The result is your website having more reach and inviting users to indulge in more of your content and, hopefully, convert them.
5. Backlinks for SEO Building: High-quality content syndication through platforms like Streem creates backlinks which can contribute to your SEO efforts. This allows you to rank your content higher in the search rankings, bringing in more website traffic.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What does syndication in media mean?
Syndication in media is the redistribution of media content like news stories, TV programs and even syndicated radio programs, among different platforms so that the same media content is able to reach several audiences through which they are channelled.
What is content syndication?
Syndicated content consists of articles, videos, or media sources that are published or broadcast over multiple platforms or channels. This strengthens the possibility of having a wider target audience without the necessity of creating fresh content for each outlet.
What are some examples of broadcast syndication?
Broadcast syndication includes shows such as Friends and The Simpsons, which air on multiple networks beyond their original channel. The concept also covers the showing of national news programs from large networks, like CNN, on neighbourhood local news stations.
What is a syndication in PR?
In public relations, the term syndication refers to the act of sharing press releases, articles, and branded content on multiple media outlets for maximum reach. It is basically availing exposure to the brands and establishing their online authority within their industry.
What is syndication in media monitoring?
Syndication in media monitoring refers to how media content such as news articles or news broadcasts is repurposed by different platforms. Streem is one such tool that tracks where and how often a business's media content appears so it can provide insight into how that business reaches and impacts audiences.
Syndicate Your Content in the Streem Platform
Streem has developed proprietary technology to identify, match and display syndicated content within the Streem platform and reporting. Some of these criteria include thresholds regarding title, word count, content similarity and as well as the published or broadcast time of the coverage to ensure accuracy in syndication and make it easier for you to access syndicated content.
In order to easily identify syndications on the platform, Streem automatically collates any media across Print, Online, Radio & TV that meets our syndication criteria. It is then identified in the platform by the plus symbol you’ll see next to a publisher or broadcaster name on the Media Item Card. You will then be able to expand this out and view a list of syndicated items, making it easier than ever to identify and access coverage across all syndications.
Accurate syndication matters! It’s important to track your syndicated content, quantify the actual reach a story has, measure the media impact, and inform better content strategies.
Unlike other MMOs, Streem doesn’t rely on standardised (assumed) syndication lists, which means that the syndicated data you access is the most reliable and dynamic view of actual syndication in the market.
At Streem, we know that accessible and reliable information regarding syndications is key to obtaining accurate insights on coverage that matters to your organisation. Get in touch today to learn how you can start taking advantage of Streem’s market-leading media monitoring and social listening platform.