Americans Are Increasingly Turning to Facebook and Twitter for News.
Are you a growth marketer? A new report released on Wednesday by the Pew Research Center and the Knight Foundation found that 63 percent of American Facebook and Twitter users rely on the social networks to get their daily news. It directs web traffic to a large portion of the Internet, it commands a huge share of mobile advertising and, increasingly, it has become the arbiter of information.
Its study of more than 2,000 Americans found that for both social networks, 63% of users surveyed said they were getting news there – up from 52% for Twitter and 47% for Facebook in 2013. That share has increased from 2013, when a Pew report found about half of users – 52% of Twitter users, and 47% of Facebook users — said they got news from the social-media sites. With 66% of US adults currently using Facebook and 17% using Twitter, that indicates that one in 10 Americans are getting news from Twitter, while four in 10 are getting it from Facebook. “These changes can be tied to many factors including personal behavior, increased activity by news organisations, as well as changes in the platforms’ filtering algorithms or content structures,” claimed the report’s authors. A Wired report notes that despite Facebook’s major audience comprising of teens or millennials, the research concludes that users of all genders, ages, races, demographics, education levels, and household incomes claimed that they consumed news through the site.
Thought-leaders from the biggest brands and most disruptive companies will share winning growth strategies on the most pressing challenges marketing leaders face today. The problem here is that Facebook’s News Feed uses an algorithm to select the posts it thinks you’re most likely to read, which is worrisome for those who like to control their information diet. They added that the trend cuts across demographics including gender, race, age, education and household income. “There was not, in other words, any one demographic driving the shift.” Twitter is more popular for breaking news: 59% of people who get their news from that social network say they use it to keep up with breaking news events, compared to 31% for Facebook. Both sites have been pushing aggressively for more user engagement onto their platforms with Trending stories and Instant Articles on Facebook, and Twitter’s purchase of live video-streaming service Periscope and curated event-based feeds. Facebook has for the past few years increased the prominence of publishers’ content in users feeds, and more recently said it’s placing greater emphasis on “high quality” content.
On both platforms, entertainment is the most popular news category: 78% of Twitter news users and 74% of Facebook news users report regularly seeing posts about it on these services. There are a lot of possible explanations for Twitter’s user growth problems, but they really boil down to one simple thing: As the content shared into streams grows exponentially, the streams have to get smarter in order to remain relevant to users.
These different ways of connecting with news have implications for how Americans learn about the world and their communities, and for how they take part in the democratic process,” Amy Mitchell, Pew’s director of journalism, said in a statement. It’s been a long time since Facebook was primarily a place to interact with friends, but this is the first study that suggests that most people who use social media are consuming news — and a large increase from 2013, from the last time Pew comprehensively studied news consumption on Facebook. It’s also trying to convince media companies and news organizations to host their content directly on Facebook itself through its Instant Articles feature.
The finding comes as both sites increase their emphasis on news — Twitter with Periscope and its rumored Project Lightning service and Facebook with Instant Articles and its new “Trending” sidebar. For Facebook, the respective percentages are 49% and 34%. “This reinforces findings from another recent report by Pew Research, which found that Facebook was relied on as a source for political news among Millennials more than any other news source, and at a far higher rate than both Gen Xers and Baby Boomers,” claimed the authors. The company is planning a new product, which its calling Project Lightning for now, to curate tweets and other content about major sports contests, entertainment events and breaking news.
Facebook did so by introducing Instant Articles, a partnerships with news publishers like The New York Times and BuzzFeed where fast-loading, multimedia articles were directly published on Facebook’s iOS app. Twitter, meanwhile, has its “Project Lightning” that will organise tweets, photographs and videos around specific news events – from sports matches and award shows to natural disasters and terrorist attacks – to make them easier for users to browse. Back in 2008, Mark Zuckerberg established Zuckerberg’s Law of Information Sharing, which predicted that the rate people share information like status updates and photos would double every year. Twitter users are more likely than those on Facebook to report seeing news on these topics, Pew said, while the sites are roughly even when it comes to other topics, like local weather, traffic, entertainment, crime, local government, science and technology, and health and medicine.
In 2009, Facebook acquired Friendfeed for $50 million, integrating a team that was using content shared from external sites to learn what users liked and didn’t like. Facebook’s “Trending” sidebar, released in June, spits out a constantly updated feed of news stories, directing users to the most-shared news content. In 2011 and 2012, Facebook poached data science teams from across Silicon Valley to build an increasingly intelligent rules engine called EdgeRank that figured out what posts to show to which user in what order.
Now in 2015, Facebook’s stream automatically notices how long it’s been since you’ve last looked, what types of content you’re interested in, what you like, what you click, and figures out who your close friends are to showcase their content. And in June Buzzfeed broke news of Project Lightning, a Twitter experiment to curate feeds of text, video and images around news events, giving readers a “newsroom experience” of breaking news. The Facebook stream has become so good that brand content is increasingly filtered out, so Facebook has just added a SeeFirst option that lets people opt-in to brand content. Google also foresaw that the exponential deluge of information would overwhelm users and in 2011 began to work on Google Now to predict what people would be interested in as a stream of cards; it subsequently shut down other personalized Google attempts like iGoogle. And while Twitter offers a cumulative feed of everything the people you follow have posted, Facebook relies on its algorithm to filter its content and select the stuff that it thinks you’ll enjoy.
Google Now launched in 2012 and after three years of iterations offers an extremely advanced interface that infers things you need to know, ranging from where you parked your car to fresh information about items you have searched. Readers were significantly more likely to come across stories on business, international news or national politics if they were reading Twitter, according to the Pew report. As John McDermott reported in Digiday, stories on Ferguson and Michael Brown generated a lot less traffic from Facebook than Ice Bucket Challenge stories, which resulted in an average of 2,106 visitors for news outlets versus 257 for the average Ferguson article. “Relying too heavily on Facebook’s algorithmic content streams can result in de facto censorship,” McDermott wrote. “Readers are deprived a say in what they get to see.” But it’s not just Facebook’s algorithm withholding news from us.
Attempts to overlay features such as the Discover tab and a “while you were gone” view did not change how the main Twitter stream works: a torrent of information that quickly slides both interesting and silly posts into obscurity. A much-discussed study, published by two Facebook employees in the journal Science, confirmed that if you identify your political party on Facebook, its feed filters out posts with differing political views. After all Facebook, unlike a newspaper, is a public space, with its own set of cultural norms, which shape the way we present ourselves on the platform.
In one of the most comprehensive studies of Facebook sharing, two professors at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania found that positive content — the kind of stuff we’d like our personal brand to be aligned with –more often goes viral on Facebook than negative content. The average Facebook user was half as likely to say that they would voice a contrary opinion with friends face-to-face, as compared to people who didn’t use the social network. Although many commenters seem to think that switching to a Flipboard or Nuzzle style view would help, Facebook, Google, and others have proven that a stream interface with cards really performs. The second step is sorting the Twitter stream by relevance, with an option to switch between relevant and temporal posts, just like Facebook did years ago.