WTOP in Washington D.C. has been at the forefront of innovation in the radio world for years. Social media is no different — led by Marketing Director Elly Rowe — as the Hubbard Radio station has seen expansive growth on the social side.
On Instagram, WTOP has nearly 65,000 followers. The WTOP Facebook page has more than 200,000 followers, which trails its X account which is over 300,000. Even a relatively new platform like Threads has seen the station perform well with nearly 15,000 followers.
Digital video efforts from WTOP have also grown in recent years, with the all-news radio outlet featuring just under 30,000 followers on TikTok and just under 25,000 subscribers on YouTube.
In this conversation with Elly Rowe, Barrett Media asked about the overall strategy of the platform, how it views “legacy” social media platforms like Facebook and X which no longer value publishers, and how WTOP enhances its digital video offerings.
*Editor’s Note: Answers have been edited for clarity and length.
Garrett Searight: For WTOP, what are the things that you guys prioritize on social media?
Elly Rowe: There are a couple of things. The first is really video in general. That’s something that historically has been a struggle for radio organizations, just because we don’t naturally have that ingrained video content in the same way that maybe some other media organizations do. But it was something that we certainly can do.
Over the last two years, it’s been something that we really prioritize. We’ve changed our reporter workflow to incorporate more video. Myself and one of my colleagues, Giang, actually created an entire Video 101, training module that we’ve been rolling out to staff over the last year or so to really get people in the mindset of thinking visuals. So video has really been first and foremost what we’ve focused on.
I think the other thing that kind of goes hand-in-hand with that is looking at platforms that really have that growth potential. When you think about platforms like TikTok, YouTube, or Instagram, those platforms really prioritize that video content, and it jump-starts the algorithm in a way that allows more visibility to all of our content. Those are places where we’ve really focused our efforts and made a really concerted effort to attract a younger demo than what we might historically have attracted on air.
Because we really feel like a lot of the time, the first touch point for specifically younger generations — like millennials, or even Gen Z — will be that digital touch point. Whether or not they go from our digital platforms back to our terrestrial radio platform, it’s important that we have a presence on the places where those individuals are, so that we’re really getting in front of them as soon as we possibly can with the content that they need at the time that they need it.
So I think it’s a combination of all those things: video, prioritizing video in a way that we train staff and the way that we talk to staff about our needs, and then also the platforms that we’re on, and making sure that we’re delivering content on those platforms that people need in the time frame.
GS: How much platform-specific content do you do video-wise? How much of that is strictly for TikTok, or for YouTube, etc…?
ER: That’s a good question. Right now, we have a social media team of three people. It’s myself — and I oversee all of social — and then my colleagues, Michelle Goldchain and Erron Franklin. We work primarily on all of the social platforms.
So we don’t necessarily create content specifically for one platform, although there are times when we do things, for example, we’ve done Instagram Lives, and our goal is to start doing like, more YouTube Lives and things like that, where we are doing platform-specific stuff. But our goal right now is actually to streamline the process so that we’re able to post more content versus posting less.
But platform-specific, that’s just kind of by the nature of the team that we have and the resources that we have, how we’ve had to do it.
Although that being said, there are times when specific things come up. For example, the other day, one of our reporters, Dan Ronan, did an interview with BBC about all of the aviation stuff that’s been going on with plane crashes and the FAA. He did an interview with the BBC. He sent that to us. It was about six minutes.
Generally, our social media content is somewhere between 40 seconds and 90 seconds, so it was a bit longer than what we traditionally do. Instead of chopping that up and putting it on all of our platforms, we decided, ‘Ok, what we’re going to do is we’ll take a still shot from that, we’ll post that screenshot on all of our platforms, and we’ll promote the full video on YouTube.’
So there’s times when we take content and we specifically decide ‘This will be best served on this platform and we’ll promote to that platform as a way to grow our audience there.’ But on the day to day, we’re typically taking content that we get and trying to repurpose that for as many platforms as we can.
GS: I love the Matt About Town series. What goes into the decision-making of what fits into that series?
ER: Matt specifically is one of the only reporters on our team at this point who thoroughly edits and produces his own video content. It’s something that he’s given special time to do. He has more time in his day when he’s going out on these shoots and these interviews than your typical reporter. He also has more video and social media expertise, and he just has more time to think that through.
He really thinks about his video content in a way that I think is unique, and he builds out his on-air pieces and his web stories like he’s building out his video first, and that is the bones everything else, which is kind of the opposite of how you would think of a typical radio reporter.
Usually, they’re thinking about the audio first, and then they’re thinking about web and the visual aspect after that. The way that Matt has built out his programming is that he spends at least four or five days during the week really focused on his specific content. So he’ll go out and he’ll spend three hours, four hours at an interview or a video shoot. He’ll come back to the office. He edits all of that video himself. And then my team is involved in adding what we call the brand elements, or the brand templates that add those finishing touches on his video content.
But we’re really collaborating with Matt because when he talks to people, he’s asking them for their social media handles, and he’s asking them, ‘Ok, do you want to be a collaborator on Instagram?’ And we’ve really grown his personal social media presence over the last two years that he’s been doing this. I think he’s been doing it more for like, a year and a half where we wanted to be able to give him the capability to have a broadcast channel on his Instagram so that he can speak specifically to his followers and ask them questions and make sure that he’s engaging with his community.
He also — when we post things to social media — is really, really good about engaging with people. So he’ll usually go through and respond to comments. He asks people questions. So he’s super, super engaged in the social and video portion of what he does in a way that is probably not possible right now for all of our reporters. But we give him the dedicated time to do it. So he does a really good job of that in terms of finding his topics and things like that. It really runs the gamut.
Sometimes it’s something that someone like a listener or a viewer has recommended to him. So he does take those suggestions into account. Sometimes it’s something that us as managers have sent and said, ‘This is something that we feel like would be really good for you.’
It just kind of depends on the situation. But there are so many of those slice-of-life stories throughout the DMV that, if anything, he has too many ideas that he can follow up on.
GS: In the past couple of years, platforms like Facebook and X have made it really difficult for publishers to get their content. Is that just a ‘The strategy becomes we don’t prioritize those platforms going forward, we prioritize the platforms that do allow us to see our content more freely shared’? What’s the thought process/strategy of platforms like Facebook and X in 2025?
ER: I think Facebook and X are interesting because, to your point, they really have de-prioritized publisher content. We’ve seen that in a really big way on Twitter, specifically, and also, certainly on Facebook. Twitter is interesting because we have a really big audience there. We have a lot of followers on Twitter, but the algorithm has really changed a lot, and so we’ve lost followers over time instead of gaining them. Facebook, we’ve just seen a drop in engagement over time that’s pretty significant.
What we do is we allocate our time according to the engagement that we’re getting on those platforms. For Facebook, a lot of time our strategy has been — and we post a lot of video content there too, probably not so much on Twitter. Twitter, we feel like it’s important as a news organization to be there. There are a lot of organizations that put out their news on Twitter first, and use Twitter as a place where you know breaking news happens. So we do feel like it’s important to have a presence. However, we kind of allocate our time according to much engagement we’re getting there, which right now is not a lot.
So we are posting consistently there, but we don’t necessarily have a Twitter-specific strategy. We’re just kind of posting the bare minimum, if you will. And then with Facebook, we are posting just as much on Facebook as we always have. But we, again, don’t have, a Facebook-specific strategy, because really what we’re looking to prioritize, in general, is growth, and also video views and engagement.
When we see a platform that’s not providing any of that, we kind of tailor our strategy accordingly. And so it’s not to say that we won’t post there, or, you know, we don’t, we don’t, we certainly do. It’s just that we’re kind of prioritizing our time based on the platforms that allow for growth, allow for engagement and allow for video views, if you will.
GS: If there’s anything that I didn’t ask you or anything you want to include or share your opinion on, I’ll give you the floor.
ER: The biggest thing for us as a news organization, is really for people to know that we are a digital news operation and we are a news operation in general whose goal is to put out information as simultaneously as possible across all of our platforms. That includes radio, that includes website, and that includes social media as well. I think that’s something that we’ve really been striving towards over the last year, is to ensure that we’re reaching audiences wherever we can, across as many platforms as we possibly can, in the places that they’re consuming most.
That’s going to continue to be our goal over the next however many years is to be that community resource for people and providing them the information in the ways that they consume it. We’ll continue to strive towards that. I think social media is a really cool place to do it, because it gives us an opportunity to approach things in a different and new way than what people might expect from a legacy news organization.
It’s been really fun to experiment with it. I’m really excited to see where it goes and I’m really proud of the team, and all the time, effort, and enthusiasm that they’ve put into it. We couldn’t do it without them.
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Garrett Searight is Barrett Media’s News Editor, which includes writing bi-weekly industry features and a weekly column. He has previously served as Program Director and Afternoon Co-Host on 93.1 The Fan in Lima, OH, and is the radio play-by-play voice of Northern Michigan University hockey. Reach out to him at Garrett@BarrettMedia.com.