Years of work building a social media presence have paid off with the Sunshine Coast Daily building a daily engagement rate of 84 per cent of its Facebook page fans.

Print circulations have been stabilised and "more importantly, our audience now knows we are at the centre of conversations, across all platforms, and that we actively participate in the news-gathering process through user generated content", says group social media editor Alexia Purcell.

Based at APN's Australian Regional Media office in Brisbane, Purcell took over the commitment from former Daily editor Mark Furler, who is now the group's digital editor. "It didn't happen overnight," she says.

With 125,835 likes and an average page engagement figure of 105,789, the paper's Facebook page has done more than simply "connect the Coast": some 84 per cent of its Facebook likers are actively engaged, every day.

Picking up from Furler's efforts, a strategy was developed to increase the group's social, digital and print audience, improve traffic referrals to websites and create a deeper relationship with users, encouraging them to become a part of the news-gathering process.

"This strategy led to an average year-on-year increases of 60 per cent in Facebook likes for the 12 daily newspaper pages, 453 per cent and then a 295 per cent growth in Facebook page engagement for the network, and a 70 per cent increase in traffic referrals in the first year," Purcell says.

"Today, APN ARM's 12 daily Facebook pages have a combined Facebook audience of 328,880."

She says they recognised that "each and every Facebook post" needed to create a conversation or contain a shareable element to engage our Facebook audience.

"By engaging our audience, we not only strengthened our relationship with them, we also increased our online PVs and UBs and stabilised print circulations."

Part of the strategy was a schedule of recurring weekly Facebook posts. Some are series or regular features, while others are based around new and engaging topics. Many are also used to create '360 content', a process which involves making posts that generate comments or photos, and then using the UGC to create a new or follow-up story, or reverse publish the content in print and online.

• Based on an article which first appeared as an INMA post