Local publishers are feeling the whiplash of an ever-changing social landscape: traffic spikes, sudden drops, new platforms and shifting algorithms. A recent Local Media Association webinar, presented in partnership with AI-powered social distribution platform True Anthem, aimed to make that chaos more manageable — and more profitable.

The session featured True Anthem’s Ashley Carufel, who leads customer strategy and insights, and Apryl Pilolli, head of technology shared services for the Knight x LMA Bloom Lab.

Their core message: you don’t need a bigger staff to grow social traffic. You need a smarter mix of formats, recirculation and automation.

The social landscape: bigger, more fragmented and still very cyclical

More than 5 billion people use social media globally, and they’re spread across more platforms than ever. True Anthem currently supports posting to 10 platforms, from Facebook and X to Threads, BlueSky and Nextdoor, and that list continues to grow.

That fragmentation creates a practical problem for local newsrooms: audience reach is expanding, but teams are not.

Carufel emphasized that, in addition to fragmentation, social traffic exhibits cyclical behavior. Using True Anthem’s network-wide data, she showed how:

  • Social traffic climbed to historic highs in 2023 (after the post-pandemic slump),
  • Dropped significantly in 2024 (in part due to Meta algorithm tests),
  • Then rebounded in 2025 to roughly 2023 levels.

Think of it, she suggested, as a mash-up of a heart monitor and a stock chart: constant peaks and valleys, but a clear long-term pattern. Her practical advice: don’t over-react to down cycles with wild strategy changes — you may just be in a season, not a failure.

Despite all the new options, Facebook still dominates referral traffic for news publishers:

  • About 92% of organic social traffic in True Anthem’s dataset still comes from Facebook.
  • X/Twitter remains a solid #2 for news, with Threads emerging as a fast-growing #3.
  • Pinterest and LinkedIn are niche traffic drivers, more relevant to specific verticals.
  • BlueSky and Nextdoor are early but promising, especially for news.

Nextdoor, in particular, is actively courting local publishers and surfacing news content heavily in user feeds. True Anthem is one of a small number of partners working directly with the platform. For local outlets posting at the DMA level rather than the neighborhood level, Carufel called Nextdoor “a big opportunity” because the potential reach advantage over individual users is dramatic.

If there was one slide Carufel would pin to every newsroom wall, it was the chart showing average clicks per post by format on Facebook.

Across True Anthem’s customers:

  • Photo posts generate roughly 4× as many clicks per post as link posts.
  • That gap has widened over the past year: performance of photo posts has trended up, while the ceiling on link posts has trended down.

For Facebook, they recommended:

  • Use photo posts as your primary traffic driver.
  • Use Reels (and video) as your primary engagement driver.
  • Maintain a mix of link, photo and video posts so you’re serving both the audience and the algorithm.

How to package photo posts for maximum traffic

True Anthem’s team has been testing Facebook packaging for more than a year across thousands of pages. Their current best practices:

  • Put the link in the first comment, not the caption.
    • Posts with the link only in the first comment outperform those with the link in the caption, and those with the link in both places.
    • Meta itself has recently advised publishers to move links out of the caption and into the first comment for photos and videos.
  • Use a clear call to action in the caption.
    • A simple line like “Read more at the link in the first comment” (in your own voice) helps drive users down into the comments.
    • Posts with a CTA in the caption outperform those without one.
  • Invest in strong visuals when you can.
    • Headline graphics (text-on-image describing the story) perform better than plain images.
    • Close-up, human-focused shots tend to beat generic stock photos like police tape.

User behavior makes this even more important. When someone sees a post, their eye typically goes:

  1. First to the image,
  2. Then to the caption,
  3. Then to the comments.

If the image doesn’t stop the scroll, they’ll never reach your CTA or your link.

Even with imperfect execution, photo posts with the link in the first comment already account for about 63% of Facebook traffic True Anthem sees across its publisher base.

Tip 2: Treat recirculation as a standard practice — even for news

The second big lever is recirculation: posting an article more than once on social when data shows it performs well.

Across True Anthem customers, recirculated posts:

  • Get 56% more impressions
  • And 23% more traffic
    than the first time they were shared.

For national news publishers, recirculated posts are generating about 50% more traffic than their original posts — especially when the first version was a test in a different format.

Carufel framed it this way: the first post is the test. If the audience (and the algorithm) tell you “we like this,” it’s wasteful not to run it again while it’s still relevant.

“But we’re a news publisher…”

That’s often where newsrooms push back. Pilolli and Carufel suggested a few guardrails that make recirculation workable:

  • Use editorial rules for freshness.
    • For breaking or short-shelf-life content, set limits (e.g., recirculate only within 8–12 hours, or within the same day).
    • For evergreen or explainer content, a gap of about a week works well before resurfacing.
  • Change the framing, not necessarily the asset.
    • Many publishers use language like “In case you missed it…” on recirculated posts.
    • You can keep the same image and link if it performed well; you don’t have to redesign everything.
  • Recirculate as photo posts whenever possible.
    • If the first post was a link and did well, recirculate it as a photo post with the link in the first comment.
    • In True Anthem’s data, recirculated photo posts generate about 61% more traffic than the initial link posts.

For publishers who aren’t recirculating at all, Carufel called it “a big missed opportunity,” especially on Facebook, where traffic has become harder to win with a single share.

Tip 3: Use AI to scale distribution, not replace editors

The third pillar of the webinar was about resourcing. As platforms multiply and algorithms change, most newsrooms are trying to cover more ground with the same or fewer people. That’s where True Anthem’s AI-powered scheduling comes in.

True Anthem now:

  • Works with more than 1,000 publishers across news, lifestyle, sports and entertainment,
  • Posts over 1 million times per month,
  • Driving close to a quarter-billion clicks to publisher sites monthly.

The key, Carufel stressed, is that editors and audience teams are still in control:

  • Publishers define the rules: what content is eligible for recirculation, how fresh news posts need to be, what formats to prioritize, and what captions should look like.
  • The AI recommends what to post when, across platforms, and executes at scale — including packaging styles like “photo post with link in first comment” and pre-set CTAs.

Pilolli shared that one LMA publisher saw a 2,800% increase in social traffic in their first 90 days with True Anthem compared with the previous period. Others typically fall somewhere between 100% and that high end.

That lift came not from one magic trick, but from aligning several tactics at once: photo posts, recirculation rules, moving links to the first comment and consistent automation.

Monetizing on-platform: Facebook content monetization

As search becomes a tougher traffic driver, Carufel and Pilolli also encouraged publishers to take monetizing attention that stays within social platforms more seriously.

Meta’s Facebook content monetization program rewards:

  • High-quality content, and
  • High-impact engagement (views, shares, time spent on posts).

The more meaningful engagement your posts generate, the more Meta pays through its monetization tools. Long captions that keep people reading, carousels and Reels that hold attention, and comment-driving posts can all contribute to those payouts — even if they aren’t primarily link-out posts.

The challenge, Pilolli admitted, is setup. Configuring the program and connecting bank details can feel “a little like rocket science.” LMA and the Bloom Lab team are helping members navigate the process and align their content strategies with the monetization criteria.

Beyond Facebook: Instagram, Threads, BlueSky and Nextdoor

While Facebook remains the primary traffic driver, the speakers urged publishers to use it as a testing ground for what to invest in elsewhere.

A few platform-specific takeaways:

  • Instagram
    • Video/Reels are essential if you want reach; Instagram is even testing Reels-first layouts in the app.
    • SEO-style, keyword-rich captions matter more now than hashtags; Meta uses them to decide which non-followers to show your posts to.
    • Some publishers are experimenting with comment-triggered DMs (“comment LINK and we’ll DM you the story”), which can outperform “link in bio” for click-through.
  • Threads & BlueSky
    • Both are emerging as news-friendly spaces.
    • Content formats will feel familiar: link and photo posts with concise commentary.
    • Demographics skew younger than Facebook and X, making them useful for diversifying audience without reinventing your workflow.
  • Nextdoor
    • Extremely local by design and currently surfacing news content heavily in user feeds.
    • Publishers posting at the DMA level see an immediate reach advantage over individual users posting to single neighborhoods.
    • Still early as a traffic driver, but the “upside is significant” — especially for local outlets that move quickly.

Where to start tomorrow

For publishers who feel overwhelmed, Carufel boiled it down to one simple recommendation:

If you do only one thing from this webinar, start using photo posts on Facebook.

From there, the speakers suggested a practical starting checklist:

  • Take your top-performing link stories each day and repost them as photo posts with the link in the first comment.
  • Begin recirculating high-performing stories within 8–12 hours (for timely stories) or after about a week (for evergreen), using clear framing like “In case you missed it.”
  • Pick one or two strong clips daily to test as Reels on Facebook and Instagram.
  • Explore the Facebook content monetization program and make sure your best-performing posts align with its engagement focus.
  • If you need help scaling all of this, consider AI-assisted scheduling and recirculation rules rather than adding manual workflows.

LMA and the Knight x LMA Bloom Lab will continue to share tools, case studies and training around these tactics. Members interested in learning more about True Anthem, Nextdoor or Facebook monetization support can contact the LMA team for introductions and follow-up resources.

The webinar recording is available here: How Publishers Can Win at Social in 2026

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Editor’s note: Artificial Intelligence was used to transcribe and create an initial summary of this article, which was then edited by LMA staff.