Title of Post: 5Pillars: Filling a news gap successfully as a team
Organization Name: 5Pillars
Industry: Online newspaper
Name of contact if available: Editor, Roshan Muhammed Salih (https://twitter.com/RmSalih, https://www.facebook.com/roshan.salih)
Web references: http://5pillarsuk.com/ http://5pillarsuk.com/about/our-team/ https://www.facebook.com/pages/5Pillars/490858150969676 https://twitter.com/5Pillarsuk
Introduction: In 2013, an ambitious news site was launched with the clear goal of expressing the opinions and news from the point of view of the three-million strong Muslim population in the United Kingdom. In these two years, 5Pillars has gone from strength to strength, increasing its viewership drastically, and dominating the social media environment in this niche area.
A side job that is now so much more
The way 5Pillars’ editor, Roshan Muhammed Salih, tells it, the news site was meant to be a side venture, but has now grown to an extent where it has taken on a life of its own, soon turning well and truly into a successful business.
Roshan’s approach has been unique within Islamic news media, through his insistence on transparency and openly admitting any shortcomings or weaknesses. Him and his team have quite literally been providing updates since the first month, then leading into year one and year two.
How 5Pillars uses social media for business performance
As a news organization, like others, which relies heavily on worthy contributors, 5Pillars has been able to take advantage of its these employees’ experience and input to do well on social media, too. Roshan said in a brief chat interview on Facebook,
“Most of our traffic comes from Facebook and Twitter and general social media shares so the contributors are all very important in helping to get the story out. They all have a big presence on social media so we utilize that to the hilt. Basically, social media is our platform… we obviously engage with our contributors on a regular basis and fully take on board their feedback. We communicate with them face-to-face, via e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, Skype.”
Lessons
While ensuring transparency and an approachable policy, 5Pillars has not only been able to rely on its contributors’ expertise to move it forward in manners its own founders hadn’t thought possible, but it has also been able to capture the attention of readers. While its social media likes, engagement, and reader numbers are set to increase several-fold every year, 5Pillars’ model of employee involvement looks to be one that will ensure the positive growth of the news site.
Submitted by: Syed Waqar Haider Rizvi
To contact the author of this entry please email: wrizvi@gmail.com
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