Interactive Marketing Relevance Blog

How different social media users influence news differently and what it says about bloggers, Twitter users and YouTube “viewers”

Journalism.org, the website of the American “Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism”, features an interesting post that provides data on the sources that people, in this case Americans, use for their news.

Pew states the news nowadays “increasingly” becomes a “shared and social experience”. It would have staggered me if this was not the case.

Half of all Americans say they call upon the people around them to help them stay aware of the news that might be of importance to them. So we don’t merely call upon our “peers” for purchasing advice, but also for the provision of news that might be of interest to us.

About 44% of the people, who use online media to keep in touch with the news, receive at least a couple of news emails per week, and automatic updates or posts from social networking websites.

Yet, this doesn’t mean that social media, bloggers, “peers”, etc. have become our most important sources for news provisioning. Pew validly says that the most authentic and original news coverage still comes from traditional journalists.

People’s impact on news items

However, thanks to technology, the actions of people do have a bigger influence on the impact and influence of a news item.

The most interesting outcome of the survey is that the news items and themes that are being spread through social media are substantially different from the stories that dominate the mainstream press.

Furthermore, big differences exist among the social media platforms themselves as well. For instance, the blogosphere, Twitter and YouTube are being dominated by entirely different types of news items.

During the 29 weeks in which Pew compared the most important news items on these three forms of social media, only one news item was deemed the “top story” on blogs, Twitter, as well as YouTube.

All animals are equal but different social media and their users are more equal than others

According to Pew, every social medium has its own personality and function.

This, of course is correct. Furthermore, when we take a look at the average data, every social medium has its own type of users.

This is actually something that we’ve known for quite some time.

And it’s also the reason why I always advice companies and marketers to first determine their strategic goals, and then choose the channel they’ll use for practicing social media marketing. I mostly recommend a blog, but the exact channels (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, a community platform like Ning, etc.) to choose depend on the goals and the target group (don't like that word, let's say the kind of people they like to converse with).

So what’s the difference per social medium type when it comes to news? The following is what Pew concluded:

Blogs: for the passionate?

Bloggers tend to include more emotionally charged stories that deal with peoples’ rights and trigger passionate ideology. These are often stories which people would be able to personalize and share in the social sphere. “Partisan langue” is frequently being made use of when doing so. In other words: emotions.

I guess bloggers sometimes tend to have strong opinions and ideals and are not afraid to share them, although many bloggers of course also simply copy and paste or restrict themselves to translate or capture the opinions of others.

Twitter: breaking news, making reputation?

With Twitter, the emphasis lies way more on technology-related stories, with Twitter itself topping the list of topics. It looks like a more narcissistic medium (with more egotist users?). Politics is being discussed far less on Twitter, even though this is a theme on blogs.

The focus of the Twitter user, when it comes to news, mostly lies on spreading “important news”, which is often “breaking” news. Whoever provides the most scoops has the most followers. Meanwhile, opinions seem to matter less.

I guess quite some Twitter users are about self-promotion and hunting followers via scoops. Where are the early days of Twitter when it was used to connect, "talk" and share?

YouTube: Google’s sensation nation?

YouTube of course has yet an entirely different focus. Insights and commentaries are seldom being posted along with news videos.

It’s mostly about the sharing, with the visual aspect naturally playing an important role.

With YouTube, it sometimes appears to be more about sensation, and even some voyeurism.

But that’s something you already knew, no?

You can read more (including examples of specific news stories and many stats) here.

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