How Social Media is doing the News

Not only is ecommerce going to social media as scommerce, increasingly social media sites are the go-to News place for some adults. Twitter capitalized on this during the week of July 12th, 2015, with a new feature that highlights tweets from news publishers. 63% of Twitter users receive their news from the social media site, up from 52% in 2013, according to data published by Pew Research Center.

Facebook referral traffic was already huge in 2015, accounting for a quarter of all referral traffic for publishers. Is Journalism set to merge with social media like never before? Loyal users of a social channel often rely on it for different types of information needs. With ecommerce and news moving to social media, is this part of the omni-channel mobile revolution? What else could move to social media?

With mobile devices, it's all about optimizing the user experience, everything from loading speed to less mobile clicks to achieve actions. While facebook algorithms look to make it harder for the posts of brands to show up on feeds to maximize their advertising revenue, other social media channels are set to compete more aggressively with facebook's monopoly.

Twitter is more known for real-time news as it happens and far ranging coverage of world events. Twitter launched Periscope, the live video streaming app that furthers their hold on real-time events as they happen. Facebook, in May, launched a beta project that allows media companies to publish stories via "instant articles" instead of linking to outside sites. In June, they added a trending sidebar to allow users to filter by topic. But it's likely other social networking sites will become major players in news use and implementation.

Facebook's reputation as a recreational & interpersonal social network makes it more liable to lose some of its share to other more casual networks like Instagram and others that are sure to emerge. Twitter, on the other hand, has a long standing relationship with all things global and political. Twitter's emphasis on news is more global, corporate and related to government. Facebook's news posts are more likely views on topics such as health, entertainment and people and events in their communities.

The rise of news to prominence on social media is not new, but is definitely trending. One of the reasons is the mobile advertising power of such sites. Which makes social media no longer funky things in the background for the youth, but mainstream channels that often rank higher the corporate websites on search. News being more present in feeds is by design as the filtering algorithms are more permissive to them as News organizations have become more active on them. This in hand, makes users more engaged in posting on current news that drives innovation from the channels themselves to better personalize the content for the end users.

 While only 17% of adults compared to 66% of American adults use twitter to facebook, competition is heating up on News integration in social feeds with 10% vs. 41% of Americans learning about News via twitter and facebook respectively. However, breaking news is still considered one of the most memorable and pervasive experience of Twitter. For education & news on niche fields and industry evolution for example, twitter is a goldmine. I see so more "footloose" content on Facebook like musical artists and whimsical videos, I cannot wrap my head around how Facebook could ever be considered for serious news events, could you?

The Big Five

• Video
• eCommerce
• News
• Online learning / Educational content
• Quality User generated content

Unlike LinkedIn that is investing in user generated content & online learning , it's hard to see how facebook is adapting besides becoming a video competitor of youtube. Twitter clearly has a great educational side to how it works that provides valuable content. While on facebook you can "like" a post creates the illusion of more engagement on a post, favourite on twitter in my mind is worth more and a retweet is priceless. My facebook feed is full of content I'd easily consider spam and junk, while on twitter my network is more targeted. So while the numbers favour Facebook as creating more engagement on News, I think the figures are fairly dubious.

Bottom line, if I was a Journalist I'd much rather have 10k followers on Twitter than a bazillion friends on facebook or silly likes on my brand's page or articles. What gets me thinking about this is how core things like online shopping and News are increasingly migrating to social. Heck, we're not even calling it "social media" anymore, it's just the new normal. In Canada, social sites in Alexa ranking of most visited sites at #3 Facebook, #9 Twitter #12 LinkedIn and #13 Reddit. We didn't even talk about Reddit for News, it's #1 in terms of News sources in Canada ahead of yahoo, CNN and the Huffington post.