On February 7 2017 the LaoisToday.ie website went live for the first time and we promised to be the Quality, Lively, Fun local media service for the Laois community at home and abroad.
This week we celebrated our first birthday, a significant milestone in our business.
It has been a whirlwind year, one that has seen LaoisToday establish a significant footprint locally. We have established ourselves as the go-to source of information, attracting almost 1 million visitors to our site and 6 million page views in the 12 months since we launched.
We have published over 5,000 stories and have an army of followers across our various social media platforms.
We have gained almost 17,000 Facebook followers which is considerably more than any other media outlet in the county. We have a huge presence on Instagram and Snapchat as we connect on a daily basis with our audience no matter where they are in the world.
And this week we are happy to push our latest offering – our mobile apps that are available to download on the App Store and on Google Play.
With most of our traffic coming from mobile devices, we decided to make life even easier for our readers with a carefully designed app. It has all the best elements from our site as well as additional features, chief amongst them our push notifications, a message that we will send to your phone for the really big stories.
Again this marks the LaoisToday out as different – as one of the only local media outlets in the country to provide a service like it.
“We’re very happy with how our first year has gone,” says Steven Miller, owner and managing editor of LaoisToday.ie, “but we’re still only getting started.
“We recently took on our first dedicated sales and marketing specialist and we now have seven people on our team, between full and part-time staff.
“As a local, family-owned business, we’re delighted that we have created these new jobs with the people filling them all previously working or studying outside the county.
“As well as providing a new experience to people in how they consume their news, we also want to provide a new and fresh way to local advertisers to promote their business.
“We are constantly working on developing new offerings and do plan to launch further services in the coming months.”
