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BREAKING NEWS & VIEWS
Facebook Likes People Mag and Broadcast NewsWednesday, March 3, 2010 Does Facebook traffic favor TV brands and does Google News favor print? Facebook has become an enormous driver of traffic to news and information sites in the last year. As we reported recently, metrics firm Hitwise found that this popular social network even beats out Google now as the Web’s chief source of referrals to media sites. But apparently Facebook users tend to click more on news coming from broadcast media than from print brands. Following up on her original research on the role social networks now play in driving media consumers, Hitwise analyst Heather Hopkins discovered that the overwhelming majority of the top 10 news and media sites visited after Facebook were either broadcast entities like CNN.com, Weather.com or Fox News or large portal entities like Yahoo! News, Google News or Drudge Report. In fact, People magazine (#5) was the only print entity among the top 10 recipients of “downstream” traffic from Facebook in the news and media category (week of Feb. 27, 2010).  On the other hand, print brands like NYTimes.com, WSJ.com, and WashingtonPost.com dominated the top 10 list of downstream recipients of Google News refers. “A larger proportion of Facebook's news and media traffic is directed toward broadcast media websites compared with Google News,” says Hopkins. In fact, in the last week of February 4.85% of traffic to broadcast media was coming from Facebook while only 1.52% came from Google. When it comes to print news and media sites, Facebook still dominates but by a much narrower margin (3.60% for Facebook vs. 2.57% for Google News). The power of Facebook for broadcast media is a bit of a mystery. Hopkins says she ran a correlation study to see if the traffic Facebook sends to a news site relates directly to the number of followers or fans the brand has for its Facebook page. “I found no such correlation,” she says. Of course the bias could come on the Google side. The Google News site could favor print brands in the news links that it surfaces in search results or on its front page. In fact, a cursory look at the search site’s news portal shows newspaper and some magazine links dominant. Want to know how your media brand can get more out of its Facebook presence? On March 25, min is assembling four Facebook gurus from Time Inc, LHJ.com, Network World and Harvard Business Review to share their tactics and strategies. Join us for the next min Webinar, “Using Facebook to Grow Your Revenues and Build Audience.” If you have breaking news to share please contact Steve Smith at ssmith@accessintel.com
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It's not so much of a mystery. It's really a matter of intent. People are on Facebook generally for entertainment/relaxation purposes, not to learn news, so the sites they click into tend to be more entertainment-based sites. Those who visit Google News are there specifically to find out about what's happening in the news (and Google News was created to meet that demand), and text-based brands are always going to have a leg up in that context over video-based brands because they produce a type of content that's perfectly matched to the distribution platform. So it's a bit misleading to say that "Facebook likes" TV brands. It's really that TV brands are a better match for the Facebook community's intent, while print-based news brands are a better match for Google News readers.
Posted by Rachel on Wednesday, March 3, 2010 @ 02:45 PM
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