Social networks are taking over the world of news sharing. Safe to say, social media is indeed reshaping the news, as stated by Pew Research Center. Half of social network site users have shared news stories, images or videos , and nearly as many (46%) have discussed a news issue or event. In addition more people are participating in bringing the news to social media as well. Pew Research found that in 2014, 14% of social media users posted their own photos of breaking news events and added them to a social network site.
With that in mind, we’ve pulled together three key facts about social media that any online media outlet should be aware of as part of your overall strategy for leveraging social media as part of your editorial process.
#1 Facebook leads the way
Facebook dominates the global social media landscape with over 1.5 billion users. Not only are there five new profiles created every second, but Facebook’s audience is also very loyal: 95 percent of Facebook users log into their account daily. Facebook users have a myriad of activities they can engage with on the site – from posting statuses and photos, liking, commenting, sharing, and viewing. One of these activities includes reading and sharing news. However, reading the news on Facebook is more or less an incidental experience. Over two-thirds of Facebook users ‘see’ news on Facebook, but only one-third actually follow news organizations of their choice on Facebook.
How can you take advantage of all the news-related conversation, commentary and sharing on Facebook for your own publication? Bring a curated experience of the Facebook conversation to your site. By showing Facebook users’ interactions, reactions, and perspectives around key news, sports, entertainment, etc. alongside your editorial content, your readers become more engaged, spend more time on your site, and are less likely to leave to (re)turn to social networking sites for news. You provide the social content for them.
#2 Roughly 29% of world population has an active social media account
According to We Are Social research, there over 2 billion active social media site accounts today. This is almost 30% of the entire world’s population. GlobalWebIndex also found that social media users spend an average of more than two hours per day on the social media sites and microblogs. Incredible amounts of conversations are happening on these networks – including sharing, commenting, linking to news stories – it’s a whole new arena for publishers to leverage and engage in.
Because of the volume of conversations happening on social (due to the vast penetration of social accounts) – publishers could be missing parts of that story and/or conversation, if they’re not taking into account what’s happening on social. At the same time all of this additional reporting, commentary, information, and points of view can help you tell a more well-rounded story. This exactly is what makes it so important to leverage social media in your editorial efforts.
#3 Social sharing varies by news topic and social platform
According to new academic research published in Journalism Studies, it depends on the news topic and the social media platform where it is posted, how often news content is shared. Opinion pieces on The New York Times, for example, gained the most attention on Facebook. If developing a Facebook audience, and having your content shared on Facebook is an important KPI for you – you should create more opinion pieces. As a result your content will most likely be shared more and commented on again. This helps fuel the conversation with your audience; you can leverage that activity back on your own site, using social media curation, to give your users that social experience directly on your site.
To conclude; social media sites are popular destinations for a good part of the world’s population, Facebook is where most people discover and share news, and what news gets shared where depends on the article & the type of site.
With this understanding, publishers can be well positioned to fuel the social sharing & engagement of their own editorial content, and at the same time leverage the conversations and commentary on social sites to complement their own editorial efforts. Social media curation stands at the nexus of this exchange.
Crowdynews’ social media curation platform helps you to find and filter relevant news that is posted on social media. You can stream it in real-time or ranked by popularity, or even automatically generate it based on an article’s content. With Crowdynews, you can provide a complete, well-balanced story to keep your users on your site longer and, most importantly, you keep them coming back & consuming more of (your) content.