November 15, 2011
News orgs missing out on social media engagement? Pew studies
This week Pew published two new studies which explore how social media gets used by news organizations and by individuals. Taken together, they indicate the power of personal engagement—and how several major news orgs may be missing that opportunity…
The big takeaway from the first study, How Mainstream Media Outlets Use Twitter, from the Pew Research Center’s Project on Excellence in Journalism, was this:
“The vast majority of the postings promoted the organizations’ own work and sent users back to their websites. On the main news feeds studied, fully 93% of the postings over the course of the week offered a link to a news story on the organization’s own website.”
...Not exactly capitalizing on Twitter’s conversational or engagement potential. Or, as Nieman Lab’s Megan Garber said, it’s a “glorified RSS feed ...pretty much a vehicle for self-promotion.”
For context, the sample of PEJ’s study was roughly representative of the larger end of mainstream news—but still limited.
PEJ examined 37 different Twitter feeds across 13 news organizations (ranging from CNN and the New York Times to the Toledo Blade). This included the main accounts from the news brand (such as @washingtonpost), as well as the accounts of certain sections, beats or writers. In total this comprised 3,646 tweets, gathered on a single “typical news week” from February 2011. They did not include Twitter feeds from hyperlocal or niche/community news outlets.
Garber observed: “These would seem to indicate ...a general insularity in news outlets’ Twitter feeds. ...In fact [as PEJ points out] organizational Twitter feeds pretty much mimic the general link-o-phobia that plagued news organizations as they first tried to figure out the web.”
News brand link-o-phobia can be a problem, as KDMC noted earlier. But 10,000 Words observed some nuances of linking and social media:
“Linking [away from] your website is commonplace now. ...But with Twitter, the search engine optimization benefits aren’t the same. ...Perhaps an algorithm change ...[could help] create incentives for news organizations and other brands to send tweets that include links to sites other than their own. That will probably only take place when we move [away from] using followers as the most important metric of measuring a feed’s influence.”
The second study came from the Pew Internet and American Life Project: Why Americans Use Social Media. Its big takeaway was: Of the two-thirds of Americans who use social media, two thirds do so mainly to maintain or rekindle personal connections.
When people are using social media to maintain personal connections, link sharing is a popular social activity. So if your news organization is going to use social media, you might as well keep in mind the kind of value that most people get from social media—and make sure you’re supporting that value.
In social terms, sharing links is a type of personal recommendation. And a recent Gallup poll found: “Consumers are far more likely to rely on personal recommendations from a spouse or from close friends or family in making decisions than a company’s sponsored online ads.”
This poll concerned brands for consumer products, not news brands. But some lesson might apply to news brands.
Regarding Gallup’s research, KDMC observed: “The real benefits from social media come not from when you post your own headlines on social media, but when people in your network re-share your content to their networks. Such personal recommendations are far more valuable to brands, including news brands. So rather than tracking your number of followers or fans, keep an eye on how often items get retweeted or otherwise shared.”
Specifically on Twitter, a key way to gain someone’s attention and goodwill is to retweet them. This demonstrates not only that you are listening to others, but that you consider what they have to say worth sharing. This encourages them to listen to, and share with their networks, your tweets.
PEJ noted: “Fox News and MSNBC tweeted less overall, but they were far more likely than the other news outlets to retweet content (44% of Fox’s tweets and 27% of MSNBC’s tweets were retweets).” By comparison, the New York Times retweeted apparently never.
Social media analytics tools, such as Tweetreach or the newly launched ThinkUp, might help news organizations consider their social media presence in a more organized—and perhaps more useful—way, taking network effects and user preferences into account.
PEJ concluded that news organizations’ generally outside link-averse behavior “resembles the early days of the web. Initially, news organizations, worried about losing audience, rarely linked to content outside their own web domain. Now, the idea is that being a service of providing users with what they are looking for—even if it comes from someone else—carries more weight. It bears watching whether Twitter use for mainstream news organizations evolves in this same way.” (Emphasis added.)
The News for Digital Journalists blog is made possible by a grant to USC Annenberg from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
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