People In The Know Turn to Facebook, Before Google News or Twitter
March 17, 2010 | Posted by: Shahed Ahmed
Before I get to the details, let me ask a quick question. If you were to guess, which platform – Facebook, Google News or Twitter – drove the most readers to articles on traditional news and media sites, what would you guess? If you thought it would go Google News, then Twitter and then, coming in at a relatively distant third, Facebook, as I did, you would be wrong.
According to Hitwise, which calls itself a leader in online competitive intelligence, in February Google News accounted for 1.39% of visits and Facebook 3.52% of visits to news and media sites like Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Financial Times, etc. The use of Facebook as a distribution source for news content, according to a February blog post on Hitwise, has been growing exponentially, especially when compared to Google News. A more recent post this week brought Twitter into the equation.
It seems anecdotally – if you look at a random slice of Tweets at any given time – that Twitter is primarily a broadcast channel where everyone from the newbie Twitterer to the seasoned Twitterati are competing to be the first to broadcast the latest piece of news. But the Hitwise data proves otherwise. Hitwise notes that a majority of Tweets, around 60 percent, is actually pointing users to social networks and entertainment sites (photography (ie. Flickr) and video sharing (ie. YouTube) sites). Twitter, during the week of March 8, only accounted for 0.14% of upstream visits to news and media sites. And, in case you were wondering, 3.64% came from Facebook and 1.27% from Google News.
So what’s the bottom line? Facebook is clearly becoming a leading marketplace for news and information, which means it should be one of the first places to consider when orgs want to generate awareness around content, whether that’s audio, video or text-based. Facebook isn’t just about random status updates and those annoying Farmville updates – that ship sailed a long, long time ago.
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Comments
April 22 2010 - 03:00 PM | by Candace Flynn
Facebook seems like more of a personal platform to stay in touch with friends, share pictures of family, etc. It’s interesting to see that the evolution of social media and main source of information is moving to this particular outlet. Why do you suppose that is? In what ways are businesses leveraging Facebook to reach out to their customers (in a B2B environment)? I guess only time will tell, but I’m not even sure how to access news on Facebook. Maybe I need to take some lessons from the 3.52% of folks who look to it for content.
June 21 2010 - 09:20 AM | by Shahed
Good feedback Candace. I wouldn’t have guessed that Facebook is driving more readers to news sites, but perhaps it is not all that surprising. If you look at social media as another media channel, like reading magazines, watching TV, etc. then which of these social networks are the most popular? Where do people spend most of their time? Which one has the largest reach?
The answer to all of those questions is of course Facebook. The typical behavior is that when we log into Facebook we connect directly with our friends, but we also scan the “notifications” page to seek information, whether that information is video, news or the those annoying Farmville updates. And those updates aren’t just coming from your friends, it is coming from companies (many B2C now, but more and more B2B companies) that you have “fanned” or “liked”. So, as long as the information is relevant to the reader, whether personal or professional information, it’s being consumed, in large quantities, on Facebook.
For B2B marketers Facebook is becoming a highly viable channel for two main reasons:
1) Its sheer reach. More than 103 million people in the US alone as of January 2010.
2) Its targeted nature. Facebook is rich with data.