Looking Up News in the Social Media

How Social Media Became Popular in News Dissemination

If we examine the picture above, we can see how social media is surpassing other traditional news mediums like radios and magazines. Although TV news is still the strongest contender, social media is now waiting to overthrow newspapers from its current second-place position. And almost everyone, especially the younger generation, favor the new over the old, social media is gaining headway in the race for people’s news choice.

Facebook leads as the most useful online news source, followed by Twitter, and then YouTube. The leading social network is hugely popular to its audience because it’s easier to use and one can immediately view the reactions to the news. This makes news in Facebook more interactive than other social sites. With Twitter, you have to sift through your feed and click your posts to see the replies, retweets and mentions. Facebook makes it possible for you to ‘like’ replies and make as many as thirty comments or more. And the good thing about this is, you can see all of them in one page!

Although YouTube is great for showing videos of what actually happened, this social media giant has its own shortcomings when it comes to news. People sometimes get tired of waiting for videos to load. If the video’s too long, you might be tempted to close the whole tab, look for news stories and scan them instead. At Facebook, you can have the video and the story. This site also allows you to send links using the ‘share’ button while in YouTube, you have to get the embed code in the video to share it to people.

Google+ has the potential to surpass Facebook because of their (almost) similar interfaces when it comes to posting status updates, photos, videos and links. But facing Facebook head on and winning won’t happen until G+ gets more users until it reaches FB’s number. Until then, G+ has to bide its time with its 11.6% share. If G+ employs a good strategy to somehow attract more users, then its percentage will surely rise.

There’s an adage saying, “If you can’t beat them, join them.” For news giants, this is inevitably true. Publications like the New York Times founded a Facebook page where they can share their content to more users. Here are sample Facebook content:

Now if you’ll notice, there are links in the content box. When clicked, these links forward to the New York Times’ website where you can view the article you want to read. If FB users become fans of NYT’s page, then they’ll be able to click those links to get the full story on topics they’re interested in. And since more and more news publishers join Facebook, this justifies Schools.com’s studies that there’s an increase of 57% traffic to news sites, which came from social media platforms.

Once checking up on these pages becomes a habit, you contribute to the 9% of adults who get the news on a digital device. So, if you’re too busy working and unwinding through social media, make time to read the news. You might get surprised to see what you’re missing. 😉