Showing posts with label Social Media News. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Social Media News. Show all posts

Thursday, October 5, 2017

Digital & Social Media News Trends?


Digital news and social media continue to grow, with mobile devices rapidly becoming one of the most common ways for Americans to get news..


As journalists and media practitioners gather for the annual Online News Association conference, here are 10 key findings from recent Pew Research Center reports about today’s digital news media landscape:

1. The Gap Between Television and Online News Consumption is Narrowing

As of August 2017, 43% of Americans report often getting news online, a share just 7 percentage points lower than the 50% who often get news on television. The gap between the two news platforms was 19 points in early 2016, more than twice as large.

The share of Americans who often get news from TV – whether from local TV news, nightly network TV news or cable news – has fallen, while the portion of Americans often getting news online – either from news websites/apps or social media – has grown.




2. Use of Mobile Devices News Continues to Grow

As of spring 2017, 45% of U.S. adults often get news on a mobile device</a>, up from 36% in 2016 and 21% in 2013. The use of desktop or laptop computers for news remains steady, with 31% saying they often get news this way. In all, 85% of Americans ever get news on a mobile device, the same proportion who do so on a desktop computer. And, among those who get news both ways, mobile devices are increasingly preferred. Nearly two-thirds (65%) of U.S. adults who get news on both mobile and desktop prefer mobile, up from 56% in 2016.



3. Older Adults are Driving the Growth in Mobile News Use

More than eight-in-ten U.S. adults (85%) now get news on a mobile device, up from 72% in 2016. The recent surge has mainly come from growth among older Americans. Roughly two-thirds (67%) of those ages 65 and older now get news on a mobile device, a 24-percentage-point jump from 2016 and about three times the share in 2013. Mobile news use also grew among those ages 50 to 64, with about eight-in-ten (79%) now getting news on mobile, about double the share from 2013. Large increases in mobile news use also occurred among those in lower-income households.


Related Article: Media Company Social Media?


4. Two-Thirds of Americans (67%) Get at Least Some News on Social Media

This represents a modest increase from 62% in 2016, but similar to mobile, this growth was driven by substantial increases among older Americans. For the first time in Pew Research Center surveys, more than half (55%) of Americans ages 50 and older report getting news on social media sites, a 10-percentage-point jump from 2016. Three of the social media sites measured – Twitter, YouTube and Snapchat – grew their shares of users who get news on their site. Twitter saw the largest growth in 2017 (up 15 percentage points) and had the largest share of users to report getting news there (74%).


Related Article: Vital 2018 Social Media Trends?


5. Nonwhites and the Less Educated Increasingly Say They Get News on Social Media

About three-quarters of nonwhites (74%) get news on social media sites, up from 64% in 2016. This means that nonwhites (including all racial and ethnic groups, except non-Hispanic white) are now more likely than whites (64%) to get news on social media. Social media news use also increased to 69% in 2017 among those with less than a bachelor’s degree, surpassing those with a college degree or higher (63%).




6. Many Americans Believe Fabricated News is Sowing Confusion, and about a third (32%) Say They Often See Made-Up Political News Online

Nearly two-thirds of U.S. adults (64%) say fabricated news stories cause a great deal of confusion about the basic facts of current issues and events. About a third of U.S. adults (32%) say they often see made-up political news online, while 39% sometimes see such stories and 26% hardly ever or never do. About half (51%) say they often see political news online that is at least somewhat inaccurate – a higher proportion than those who say they see news that is almost completely made up (32%). About a quarter (23%) say they have ever shared made-up news stories themselves, with roughly equal shares saying they have done so either knowingly or unknowingly. A large majority (84%) of Americans say they are at least somewhat confident in their ability to recognize fabricated news.


Related Article: Fake News, Hoaxes and Hate-Monger Social Media?


7. Americans Have Low Trust in Information From Social Media

Just 5% of web-using U.S. adults have a lot of trust in the information they get from social media, nearly identical to the 4% who said so in 2016. This level of trust is much lower than trust in national and local news organizations, and in information coming from friends and family. In fact, in a separate study focusing on science news about twice as many social media users distrust science posts on social media as trust them (52% compared with 26%, 21% of social media users do not see any science posts).


Related Article: Being Smart On Social Media Refresher?


8. Social Media and Direct Visits to News Organizations Websites are the Most Common Pathways to Online News

When asked how they arrived at news content in their most recent web interaction, online news consumers were about equally likely to say they got news by going directly to a news website (36% of the times they got news, on average) as they were to say they got it through social media (35%). They were less likely to access news through emails, text messages or search engines.

While social media is a common pathway to news, when people follow news links, source recognition is lower for news accessed through these platforms than it is when the link comes from a news organization.

When news links came directly from a news organization’s emails, texts or alerts, the individual could name a source for that link 78% of the time. That far outpaced source recall when a link came through social media (52% of such instances) or a friend’s email or text (50%).




9. Online News That Comes Via Emails and Texts From Friends or Family is the Type of News Encounter Most Likely to Result in a Follow-Up Action

Among the five pathways studied, news instances spurred by emails and texts from friends or family elicited the most activity; nearly three-quarters (73%) of these instances were acted upon in some way. That outpaced social media and direct visits to a news organization’s website, where a follow-up action occurred in about half of news instances (53% and 47%, respectively).

Overall, talking with someone offline, whether in person or over the phone, was the most common action taken with digital news.


10. An Analysis of Nearly 2700 Different Search Terms Associated With the Water in Flint, Michigan, Shows That Online Searches Can be a Good Proxy For the Public's Interest, Concerns or Intentions

The data revealed that residents of Flint were searching for information about their water before the government recognized the contamination and before local and regional news media coverage intensified beyond a handful of stories related to the initial switch of the water supply.

While news was the first type of information people searched for, questions about personal and public health implications soon came to the forefront. The politics of the water crisis – which involved the governor of Michigan, the city of Flint and several agencies – did not resonate as a local search topic until President Barack Obama reacted, when the story spread nationally.




Guest Authored By Kristen Bialik & Katerina Eva Matsa. Kristen Bialik is a research assistant at Pew Research Center. Katerina Eva Matsa is a senior researcher focusing on journalism research at Pew Research Center.




“Digital news and social media continue to grow, with mobile devices rapidly becoming one of the most common ways for Americans to get news.."

    • Authored by:
      Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at YourWorldBrand.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Loveland, Colorado. I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)
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    Location: Loveland, CO 80538, USA

    Tuesday, September 12, 2017

    Media Company Social Media?


    For years, ad execs and editors at major publishing houses ferociously resisted any sort of relationship with influencers.

    And yet, over the past 18 months, we've seen the exact opposite happen: Publishers are now embracing influencer marketing and integrating influencers into their advertising and editorial operations in a big way.



    Publishers ranging from Hearst to Conde Nast to Univision (full disclosure: Hearst and Univision are partners of Reelio's) and many more are now embracing influencers, and you shouldn't expect the magnetism to stop anytime soon.

    So what flipped? What was the original orientation that created such resistance between the two parties, and what is the new orientation that is generating such pull? From my perspective, after hundreds of conversations with dozens of publishing executives over the past several years, the single biggest shift has been that publishers have moved away from an orientation of quality to an orientation of scale. In other words, publishers have stopped seeing influencers as content creators who can't pass editorial muster at Cosmopolitan and Esquire and started seeing them as scaled distribution channels, ripe for monetization.

    Contributor Models Help Media Companies Keep Up With the Never-Ending Content Cycle

    Advertisers care about engaged audiences. This puts media companies in a position where they must produce enough relevant content to draw attention and keep up with traffic and to ensure that the content earns a high watch or read time. The pressure is on to fulfill quantity and quality demands. Whereas influencers initially didn't meet media companies" quality standards, those companies eventually realized that they themselves were incapable of meeting their audience's quantity standards.



    In today's content-saturated world, producing sufficient content flow can be difficult.

    In order to maintain an influx of readers, many media companies have chosen to adopt a contributor model that relies upon influencers to create content for the publication. In fact, Forbes has built a contributor base where content creators, who have their own individual audiences, are writing content for Forbes and bringing their audiences with them. By doing so, Forbes doubled their audience. While this contributor model is text-based, it can be applied to any kind of media and platform.

    And more content leads us to higher watch/read time, a statistic that lots of advertisers care about. User-generated content in influencer marketing is proven to generate, on average, seven times the watch time -- of content created by advertisers themselves.

    Surprisingly, media companies found that it is through the sheer volume of that content contributor models generate that enables them to create quality content that maximizes watch time. The more experimental content you publish on your site, the more data you'll have around what is retaining audience's attention and what isn't. But of course, once you create the content, then you have to distribute it, and that's where influencers" value to media companies is most important.



    Influencers Provide Additional Scaled Distribution Channels With Incredible Economic Value

    Media companies are more than just the content they create. They also provide the channels through which that content is distributed. Today, that power has been eroded. And the channels through which media companies distribute content are no longer ones that they own or control. The previous dynamic was to fight this shift. Now they're embracing it.

    When you start to think of influencers as not only sources of content, but also as viable distribution channels themselves, then the win-win relationship between media companies (with their massive archives of owned content and other intellectual property like characters, brands, etc.) and influencers becomes even clearer.

    Not only are content contributors more likely to republish the content they make for these media companies on their own channels, but the content they create can be used for various distribution efforts and see a better return on distribution.

    Machine Zone, for example, used gaming influencers to create content around their new app and then used the YouTube video that had the highest watch time in a television commercial.

    It's a simple answer to the question of efficiency. Why try to produce higher watch time/read times on your own instead of using content creators who are already maximizing watch time/read time on the content they're producing?



    Repurposing Old Content And Leveraging Intellectual Property Also Helps Media Companies Scale

    Content creators don't always have to produce entirely original content either. Once you find a theme that has stuck with an audience (by looking at great watch time rates), content creators can work with it to remix and redistribute. This is a bit different than just re-sharing content.

    On a large scale, how do you re-engage new audiences with <em>Star Wars, a well-known classic? And how do you get more viewers to jump on the newest season Game of Thrones? You repurpose licensed content and distribute.

    Media companies (sports networks and entertainment companies in particular) are remixing and leveraging intellectual content to drive more audiences. Take, for example, HBO's Game of Thrones Beginner's Guide video. The idea is to catch up new interested viewers quickly and easily using the original licensed content.



    And it's successful. One comment reads "I didn't know I needed this in my life - but now I do." You can assume this led to a lot more viewers trying out the show.

    The YouTube channel Bad Lip Reading is also a good example of the engagement that can strike when licensed content is repurposed.

    The folks behind Bad Lip Reading are content creators, and franchises like Star Wars and the NFL have both earned shares, likes and comments from old and new fans alike on a remix of the licensed content -- and earned coverage on other sites like SB Nation. That's how you keep relevancy.

    Publishers are embracing influencer marketing and influencers into their advertising and editorial operations in a big way, and you shouldn’t expect the magnetism to stop anytime soon.

    Guest Authored By Pete Borum. Pete is the Co-Founder, CEO of Reelio, a data driven influencer marketing platform that connects brands to the right influencers. Follow Pete on Twitter.




    “If you're a media company, a diverse content creator pool can lead to more content that's more relevant to your audience, more distribution and ultimately more engagement.

    And that's a recipe that will make any advertiser happy.." -Pete Borum

      • Authored by:
        Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at YourWorldBrand.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Loveland, Colorado. I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)
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      Location: Loveland, CO 80538, USA

      Monday, January 16, 2017

      Fake News, Hoaxes and Hate-Monger Social Media?


      The internet held the promise of an interconnected global village that facilitated cooperation and dialogue through authentic information sharing..


      But the interaction between our inherent human tendencies and social media platforms has produced an epidemic of misinformation, hoaxes and hate-mongering that threatens this vision.


      Social media is increasingly influencing the way we consume news. Research by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism in 26 countries shows that more than half of those sampled use social media as a news source.

      This trend comes at a cost as social media is not known for its accuracy, or the advancement of challenging and diverse perspectives. Filter bubbles, created through personalized and algorithmic news feeds, reinforce this.

      Unrestricted access to information is a cornerstone of a vibrant democracy. But if this information is inaccurate, biased or falsified, the fundamental freedom of informed choice is denied. In essence government accountability, social justice and equality are severely compromised. Thus social media, as the most effective purveyor of fake news and conspiracies, poses a serious threat to democracy.


      Rise Of Fake News

      In the wake of political upheavals – the US presidential race and Brexit are good examples – there has been a surge in fake news, conspiracies and pseudoscience discourses on social media platforms.

      In South Africa 2016 was an annus horribilis for the governing African National Congress (ANC) and President Jacob Zuma. A pervasive conspirator narrative about a sinister “third force” meddling in the nation’s affairs hogged the headlines. Fighting for his political life, Zuma blamed Western intelligence for allegedly stirring up criticism of him.


      These and other events have seen “post-truth” emerge as the Oxford Dictionary international word of 2016. The term refers to the irrationality that prevails when appeals to emotions and personal beliefs, rather than hard evidence, are more powerful in forming political opinions.


      There is now a burgeoning “cottage industry” of websites that invent fake stories. Analysis by Buzzfeed of the recent US election pointed to the prevalence of fake and hyper-partisan content on Facebook pages and websites.

      The attraction to this fake news isn’t surprising. Research suggests that the public is also more likely to indulge in conspiracy theorizing during periods of insecurity and discontent.

      Threat To Democracy

      Analysts and politicians warn of a “digital virus” of falsehoods spread by conspiracy theorists and trolls that entrench polarised politics. These threaten democracy.

      With the rising tide of populism we have seen popular mistrust, and even rejection, of the political establishment and mainstream media. In a climate of “us vs them” researchers find that people, especially conspirators, are attracted to alternative news sources. They are motivated by the desire to avoid the perceived manipulation by mainstream media and become susceptible to fake news.


      In Africa, conspiracy making occurs across the political divide. It is used by regimes to entrench power, or by the opposition to erode it.

      Zimbabwe is a prime example. Conspiracy theories have been part of 92-year-old Robert Mugabe’s presidency in the almost 37 years of his rule. He has muzzled the country’s media and railed against Western powers for conspiring to unseat him and destroy the economy. Conspiracies about plots to assassinate him abound.


      In South Africa conspiracy theories proliferate from the constant crises around embattled Zuma and the ANC. A constant refrain has been that the media conspire with third parties to discredit the ANC and mislead the public.

      Conspiracy Theories: Narratives on Steroids

      Stories and storytelling are an inextricable part of human consciousness. It is through stories that we interpret the world, imagine other possibilities and adopt other perspectives.


      In this way humans are hardwired for conspiracy stories that contradict official accounts of events or factual evidence. As such conspirators are not unhinged or paranoid. They “cut across gender, age, race, income, political affiliation, educational level and occupational status”. No individual or group is immune from conspiratorial thinking. And if a group believes one conspiracy, it is likely to believe others.

      Conspiracy theories – described as “narrative on steroids” – offer enticing clickbait opportunities for the human brain on social media platforms. The typical fictitious plot describes the sinister machinations of powerful groups or organisations that work in secret against the public good.

      Research shows that narratives have powerful traction online when they feed into a conspiratorial worldview that affirms a rejection of official explanations. Such stories consciously, or unconsciously, induce emotional contagion – communal emotions of hate, anger and fear – that are further amplified.

      Why Technology Can’t Save us From Ourselves

      Is the post-truth climate and the concomitant surge in falsehoods and conspiracy theories a spasm in history, or does it reflect a seismic political shift? The jury is still out. But social media as a news source – without the fact-checking and the editorial filters of responsible journalism – is a growing trend.


      It would seem logical that a “digital virus” of insidious mistruths and half-truths created by the use of technology would, and should, be cured by technology. Some technological correctives have in fact presented themselves. Facebook, for example, has announced it will use fact-checking services to flag fake stories as “disputed”.

      Guest Authored By Lyn Snodgrass. Lyn is Associate Professor and Head of Department of Political and Conflict Studies, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University. She has an Honours (Psychology), MA (Conflict Resolution) and DPhil (Conflict Transformation and Management). Her research, transdisciplinary at the interstices of Politics, Psychology and Conflict Resolution, interrogates deep-rooted, intractable conflict. Her current focus is the role of collective emotion (hate and humiliation) and communal memory in the manifestations of violence. As scholar-practitioner she specialises in conflict management interventions, training in conciliation, mediation, negotiation and conflict resolution systems design with an emphasis on Africa.





      "Technology cannot be the panacea when the intense and overwhelming social media space presents a perilous mismatch with our innate human capacities and tendencies.

      This human-digital interface makes social media the most effective and dangerous enabler of human irrationality, distorted perceptions, and conspiratorial thinking ever invented.."


        • Authored by:
          Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at GetMoreHere.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Los Angeles, CA where I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)
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