For Michael Wolff, writing in MIT Technology Review, the acceptance of Instant Articles by major players who have signed up to provide content through the feature provided yet another example of bad decision-making by the news industry. As he points out: “Netflix will pay approximately $3 billion in licensing and production fees this year to the television and film industry; Hulu is paying $192 million to license South Park; Spotify pays out 70 percent of its gross revenues to the music labels that hold the underlying rights to Spotify’s catalogue. Now here’s what Facebook is guaranteeing a variety of publishers, including the New York Times, BuzzFeed, and the Atlantic, which are posting articles in its new “instant articles” feature: $0.”

He accuses news publishers of giving away their content for free, while at the same time losing control of their branding and valuable usage data. In the Facebook deal, publishers can sell ads on their articles and keep all of the revenue, or have Facebook sell ads in exchange for 30 percent.

“In the case of these new platform distribution deals—while they all involve slightly different plays—they each mimic a standard publishing business model: syndication. That is, a publisher with access to a different audience redistributes the content of another publisher—of course paying the content owner a fair fee. In some sense, this is the basis of the media business … Content is valuable–otherwise why distribute it?”

This leads Wolff to wonder whether “republishing initiatives are digging a deeper hole for publishers or helping them get out of the one they are already in”. He sees no reason to think things will turn out well: “…publishers have largely found themselves in this dismal situation because of their past bad decisions—accepting the general free ethos, bowing to a vast catchall of casual and formal sharing and re-posting agreements, and failing to challenge an ever-expanding interpretation of fair use. It seems only logical to doubt the business acumen of people who have been singularly inept when it comes to protecting their interests in the world of digital distribution.”

Facebook’s rationale for publishers to support Instant Articles is that it will provide a better user experience and deliver bigger audiences. While true, Wolff says that publishers will lose sustainable brand-building opportunities; it’s a model that better suits content that maximizes revenue potential, in particular ‘native content’, and will further push down digital ad prices.

According to Wolff, this type of syndication arrangement represents “another step closer toward what Ken Doctor, an analyst and journalist who has closely covered the demise of the news business, calls “off news site” reading. In this, publishers effectively give up their own channels and become suppliers of content to more efficient distribution channels … In effect, the New York Times becomes a wire service–the AP, except where the AP gets paid huge licensing fees, the Times does not.”

With the collapse of traditional ad revenues, publishers have justified pushing forward with digital experimentation because others were and because they couldn’t afford not to, even though they don’t fully understand the technology. “The ultimate result was a disastrous, sheep-to-slaughter endgame scenario, in which the new, digitally focused publishers are a fraction of their analog size. And now, in the prevalent view, there is simply no turning back.”

Meanwhile, dollars are flowing into the coffers of TV, movie and sports content creators. Even music, is fighting to win back control of – or at least payment for – its product. Wolff concludes that while there are differences between entertainment and news publishing that may explain why the old rules don’t apply in the new world, “perhaps publishers are just shamefully bad businessmen”.

In Mobile Marketing Daily, Steve Smith reviews the Apple News app and what it means for the news business. He concludes that in user experience terms it’s similar to Flipboard and Zeit – aggregating content from news sites and blogs in an attractive, easy-to-use way – but his diagnosis for the publishing industry makes for grim reading: “The legitimate worry of course is that media brands further lose control of their audience, data, context – and potentially, of their advertisers. I would say “Alert the media,” but in this scenario the media are already dead men walking.”

Writing for Fast Company, Joel Johnson points out that Apple and Facebook are just giving users what they want: a faster, less cluttered experience, compared to the slow load times and multitude of ad forms assaulting users on the sites of news publishers, who are forced into maximizing revenue by any means possible. Aggregators may provide a better – though banal – experience, “but it is unclear if most publications will be able to survive on only the revenue granted by these platform companies alone.” Apple’s attitude that “advertising is always unwelcome, unless it happens to be advertising that Apple itself lords over” is also a serious concern. “With small-to-midsize publishers already dropping like flies, things are looking perilous for readers and writers alike.”

In a statement, Patrick Grove, CEO of Catcha Media was transparent about the goal of the RM60 m (nearly $20 m) tie-up:

Digital marketing is the future; social media marketing is the apex of this future and is the fastest growing media category on the planet.

This new company offers a tremendous opportunity to dominate the future of digital marketing in Malaysia by pairing two clear leaders in the space in a manner that creates a holistic and complete solution for any brand looking to ride the crest of the new media wave.

It is not just a general new media trend that Catcha is looking to ride but rather the group hopes to take advantage of Malaysians’ social media obsession. Says.com is a social news aggregator that crowdsources trending news items from social media users. It encourages these social media leaders to curate and share news items by paying them when they share advertiser-sponsored content. It’s a low-cost editorial model that differs greatly from traditional news sites, but it is a model that has attracted major global brands including Nike, Coca-Cola and Nestlé.

“Says.com is designed to put advertiser content at the centre of social attention, positioning brands to capture the new generation of consumers,” site co-founder and CEO Khailee Ng told Digital News Asia. Says operates country-specific sites, and Ng says the site is looking to expand to the Philippines, Singapore and India, according to the Next Web. Ng added that the two companies saw a number of opportunities for the “future of advertising” in combining Says.com’s model of social media distribution and Catcha Media’s content.

Catcha Media is building what it hopes will be one of the most profitable new media businesses across Southeast Asia, and Grove said that the Catcha Media will be considering an initial public offering in the next 12 months. It operates Microsoft’s online presence in Malaysia, including the MSN portal and Windows Live site. The group also has 15 national magazines, an Asian auto classifieds business and a luxury goods e-commerce site, Hauteavenue.com. The merger of content, classifieds and e-commerce mirrors the international strategies of other media groups such as Scandinavia’s Schibsted and South Africa’s Naspers.

The fight for advertising

While Says.com doesn’t look like or work like a traditional news website, its low-cost editorial model smartly leverages the intense social media activity in South and Southeast Asia.

One of the most damaging mistakes that news groups in developed digital markets have made was to underestimate the impact of non-traditional news sites like Says.com on the business of journalism. Too many editors, journalists and ad teams didn’t realise the competitive threat these sites posed, either because they defined their competitors too narrowly, seeing only other newspapers or broadcasters as competition, or because they sneered at what they saw as low quality content.

With this merger, it should be clear that Catcha and Says.com mean business, and they already count lucrative international advertisers as customers. In the digital era, anyone who competes for digital advertising is your competitor, and as publishers, media executives and sales team leaders, you need to be able to compete not just against your traditional competitors but also this new breed of business.

To respond to this threat:

• Think of how you can fight for the attention of social media users. Develop strategies to reflect, capture and retain the attention of social media users in your audience.
• Don’t narrowly define your competition for attention and advertising too narrowly as digital grows. Newspapers and magazines are producing more audio and video that could compete with broadcasters, and any ad-supported site is a competitor for digital ad revenue.
• Be creative with your advertising products and strategy. The business and advertising model of Says.com isn’t complicated, but it has obviously been attractive to advertisers. How can you make your advertising products more social?
• Know your audience, which in digital means investing in market research and analytics. It will make for stronger journalism and a stronger proposition for advertisers.

It’s also important in the early stages of the digital transition in your market to be proactive in developing not just your digital editorial but also your digital business. This will put you on a better footing to compete with national and international players when they enter your market.

Facebook may be the king of social networks, but it never rests on its laurels or market-leading position. Many social networks have come and gone, and Facebook is constantly tweaking its winning formula and design. It has just announced major changes to its signature news feed, changes that have profound implications for news organisations.

Unlike the changes in 2011, when Facebook launched frictionless sharing, the new changes could help Facebook users find your content, but you’ll need to make a few changes to how you share your content and how your page looks to make your editorial stand out. The key is to use bigger and better images. TV and radio stations and networks will want to consider posting more content as well, as it will be easier for users to filter their news feeds based on photos, music and video.

It will take months for the new design to roll out, but if you want to get an early look, you can sign up for the waiting list to switch here. If Facebook is a key element of your social media strategy, it’s definitely worth it.

Facebook wants to be a ‘personalised newspaper’

It is not a secret that Facebook wants to be the main lens through which its users view the world and the world’s media. In announcing the new changes to the news feed, founder, Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that he wants Facebook to become a ‘personalised newspaper’. Many of the changes are designed to allow users to quickly filter their news feed, not just by their relationship to people they have friended and followed but also based on the type of content, whether the content includes photos, music or video.

On how Facebook plans to deliver this personalised experience, Craig Kanalley, senior editor for “Big News & Live Events” at The Huffington Post, is very excited with the changes and described many of the new features and how they will allow for greater personalisation:

I have topical feeds, interest lists, of “News,” “Hockey,” “Journalists, “Tech,” and more. I have geo-located feeds too that Facebook auto-created for me like friends in Buffalo (my hometown), friends in New York City (where I live). I can browse all of these sections and discover content posted just moments ago, quickly and easily from the sectional navigation of my “personalized newspaper” at the top right. Tiny gray notification bubbles let me know how many new posts have gone up in a section since I last visited it.

Of course, this will require users to invest a bit more in customising Facebook. However, even if people don’t choose to take full advantage of these settings and topical lists, there are other changes that will have an impact on how the content of news organisations will appear and how prominently it will appear for Facebook users.

What this means for news organisations

The changes actually give news organisations more opportunity to catch the attention of your audience, but you might need to make some changes to your current Facebook strategy.

Multimedia matters – The first big change that you will notice is that pictures and images associated with videos will be bigger. When a user shares one of your stories, a much larger image will appear in the news feeds. The content is now front and centre in the news feed. If you want your stories to stand out, you’ll need to share stories with strong, eye-catching pictures. Social media and tech site Mashable says:

Photos now make up nearly half of all News Feed stories, according to Facebook, up from 30% just a year ago. That growth is likely to accelerate now that Facebook is enlarging the size of photos in the News Feed. Facebook recommends publishers use images with a width of at least 552 pixels.

Facebook is doing this because it is bringing to the desktop a lot of features that it already has on its mobile app, and in mobile, images are increasingly a strong hook for readers as they quickly scan their news feeds with a swipe of their finger.

Make the cover image of your page stand out – Keeping with the theme of being more visual, when a fan likes your page, a larger, more visual sharing element will appear in their news feeds so you might want to upgrade the cover image for your page.

Focus on encouraging fans to share your content – This has always been important, but with the new changes, it will become even more important. One of the new ways for Facebook users to filter their feeds is “All Friends”. Kanalley from The Huffington Post describes it this way:

The “All Friends” feed is one of the most addicting parts of the new Facebook homepage. It’s real-time, and it’s easily accessible at all times, just one click away in the top right of the screen. It delivers your friends, and only your friends, no sponsored posts, no brands, nothing else.

This means that if you are running a sponsored post campaign, your content might not be reaching as wide an audience as in the past if some users decide to use the “All Friends” view as their default view. However, they will see when their friends share your content. This is why it will be important to think about ways to focus your Facebook efforts on the most shareable content with attractive images and compelling multimedia.

Related content from pages and people (such as celebrities) you’ve liked – Some coverage referred to this as curated posts, but it really is a new class of “story type”, according to Lavrusik. For instance, if you liked a site such as The Huffington Post, you might see a post in your news feed with the most shared stories from the site. If you are a fan of a celebrity, you might see a post with the latest trending news about that celebrity.

Changes merge mobile and desktop design – The changes to the news feed incorporate some of the features already found on the mobile and tablet apps. If your audience uses Facebook primarily on mobile, adapting your strategy will have added importance.

This isn’t the first time that Facebook has looked to become the default filter for news media. In 2011, Zuckerberg announced frictionless sharing and several major media companies, including the Guardian and The Washington Post, launched apps that effectively replicated their sites within the social network. For a while, Facebook drove large amounts of traffic to their content, but the feature created a lot of noise, a lot of concern and even some embarrassment for users. Within months of launch, Facebook made changes to the way that the newspapers’ content appeared in the news feed. Traffic crashed to the apps, and both the the Guardian and the Post have since withdrawn the apps.

However, this update gives news organisations more opportunity to highlight their content rather than get lost in the noise of automatic sharing. It does require you to focus more on the visual elements of your stories, but with the focus on pictures, this might lead more users to click through to your stories. This could be a very good development, and for TV companies with video ad units embedded in the video, this might also increase CPMs and revenue. This update has the opportunity to benefit news organisations and not just benefit Facebook.

Other resources

For other summaries of the changes:

• The San Jose Mercury News has an excellent summary of the six major features in the news feed changes.
• Vadim Lavrusik, the Journalism Program Manager at Facebook, explained the changes in the news feed.
• The Drum got feedback on the new Facebook changes from marketing, social media and advertising leaders.

Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Michigan looked at “507 Twitter users and a half-million of their tweets over 15 months” and took into consideration “(behavioural), content, and network data” to answer the question of what drives growth in Twitter followers.

The study, which is available in PDF form, found:

• “Message content significantly impacts follower growth.” If you’re negative, your follower numbers will go down, but “expressing positive sentiment” helps grow your number of followers.
• One finding supports the common advice that you should fill out your profile completely.
• Good writing helps, and the study found that readability will help increase your following as well. “When deciding whether or not to follow a virtual stranger, we found Twitter users seek out well-written over poorly written content,” CJ Hutto from the Georgia Institute of Technology and one of the authors of the study told New Scientist.
• In good news for news organisations, “informational content attracts new followers”.

That’s what you should do to increase followers, but the study also found some practices to avoid unless you want to send your follower numbers plummeting.

• Be careful that the tweets don’t stray into simple promotion of your news organisation. The study drew a contrast between “Informers, those who share informational content” and “Meformers, those who share content about themselves”. The report found “Meformers were reported to have almost three times fewer followers than Informers.”
• Don’t clutter your tweets with multiple hashtags. Hashtags can be useful to combine tweets about a single event or ongoing story, such as an election campaign. However, one hashtag will do instead of three.
• The study also found that “broadcast communications” rather than directed communications have a negative impact on your follower count too. It’s important to put this finding in context for news organisations, which often use their primary accounts to share their content very much in a broadcast manner. These accounts often have a lot of followers. One key finding from BBC research is that editorial choice, even for their main BBC-branded accounts, is important. Simply using your Twitter or other social networking accounts to broadcast all of your stories isn’t the most effective use of social media.

However, for individual journalists, it is clear from internal research at MSN network and the BBC that for journalists’ accounts, they have much higher levels of engagement and interaction and also have a stronger and larger network. This interaction – comments, questions and responses – is what the study means by directed communication. Individual journalists need to remember to act as individuals rather than headline services for their own content.

Of course, Twitter use does vary across cultures. What strategies have you tried that have helped you gain the following you have? Were there any techniques that you used that you believe cost you followers? What differences have you found in how Twitter or other social networks are used in your culture? Share your tips in the comments.

• Start small and build in stages
• Take advantage of low-cost digital development
• Invest in what makes your product distinctive
• Give your product a strong launch
• Be as creative commercially as you are editorially
• Measure and evolve

In a little more than a year, India’s Firstpost has been able to break into a crowded digital news market with a mix of original reporting, curation and “breaking views” – sharp and smart analysis and comment.

It has achieved this success by starting with a small, focused team of journalists and building up a network of contributors and stringers. Use of social media, including Twitter and Facebook, has exploded in the last few years, and Firstpost has not only positioned itself at the centre of the news debates of the day, but also leveraged its social media presence into a revenue opportunity.

The genesis of Firstpost

Network18 Founder Raghav Bahl has successfully built a media empire by launching joint ventures with many of the world’s most well-known media brands, including CNN, Forbes, CNBC and Viacom, but in 2010, he wanted to create a brand of his own. More than that, he wanted this new brand to be digital.

Firstpost would be launching into a very competitive digital market; Indian newspapers and television stations all have their own news websites already. Firstpost had to differentiate itself not just from competitors, but also from news sites already in Network18’s portfolio including that of news channel CNN/IBN and CNBC 18’s MoneyControl, the leading financial portal in India.

So, with a market awash with news choices and a portfolio of existing news websites, Firstpost decided to focus on “breaking views”, smart analysis and opinion, rather than breaking news to attract an audience and appeal to advertisers.

“We needed a product that would stand out. We knew it had to have the qualities of the web. It had to be based on the principles of curation and social sharing,” said Durga Raghunath, vice president of products for Web18 and executive news producer for Firstpost.  “If you look at the most read stories on the web, it is not often the most reported,” she said, adding that instead the most read stories are often sharp opinions and smart views.

In addition to standing out in a crowded market, the challenges of financial sustainability are different for a pure digital product than for a newspaper or broadcast news organisation. Although digital costs can be much lower than print or broadcast, digital revenue models are still being developed. Put simply, digital news projects might be cheap to launch but often find it just as difficult, if not more so, as traditional news operations to make money.

The digital advertising market in India, which includes not just display but also search, video, classified and rich media, is currently estimated to be about $410m, according to the Indian e-tail report. That’s relatively small considering the size of the Indian economy, and it only represents about 7% of total advertising in the country. A news site can tap into video, display and classified advertising but, of course, search advertising goes to digital players like Google.

“Start small and build”

To meet these challenges, one of the key pieces of advice from Raghunath is to start small and build with each stage.

Digital development, maintenance and distribution costs can be much lower than newspaper or broadcast products, and Firstpost took full advantage of the possibilities of these lower costs. Based on her experience at Wall Street Journal Asia, Raghunath thought that the open-source content-management system (CMS) WordPress would be a good fit for their website, and because a developer on staff was familiar with it, they did not need to hire an external development company.

Raghunath believes that you should focus your investment on what makes you distinctive. Instead of spending a lot on the CMS, they invested in a modern design that set it apart from the cluttered look of other Indian sites.

Staff and content make up the bulk of the costs for a site like Firstpost. About 20 to 30 percent of the content for Firstpost comes from newsrooms in its network, such as CNN/IBN or CNBC 18, but Firstpost isn’t as integrated with its broadcasting partners as the web newsroom of a broadcaster or newspaper would be.

Original reporting can be expensive, so they needed to find a way to choose carefully which original stories they would produce, and then do so without huge costs. The site launched with a small core editorial team of less than 20. Firstpost had to balance the need for original reporting and content with the revenue that it could reasonably make.

Those decisions are paying off. A little more than a year after its launch in May 2011, Firstpost has been able to both create a small investigative reporting team as well as pay stringers for original content.

“There are some stories where you have to have boots on the ground,” Raghunath said, citing as an example the coverage of a deadly riot at a Maruti Suzuki automotive plant in July 2012.

The site wraps the news of the day in its breaking views analysis. Social media and participation are central to the site. Borrowing the idea of trending topics from popular micro-blogging service Twitter, the biggest stories of the day are highlighted using another feature of Twitter, hashtags – keywords preceded by a #.

Like many other sites, Firstpost has found that live blogs are a popular feature with audiences, and it regularly produces live blogs on news and sporting events, including the current London Olympics.

With Firstpost being a social media fuelled, discussion-driven site, they have attracted a highly engaged audience; as a result, more than half a dozen members of the Firstpost community have also become contributors, said Raghunath.

To give the site a strong start, it launched with an advertising campaign that emphasised the site would be social and focused on participation, using iconic images of Martin Luther King Jr., the Arab Spring, Gandhi and India’s own struggle for independence.

This year, they took a poke at India’s powerful newspapers and told audiences to read today’s news today on Firstpost as opposed to the day after in newspapers.

To help build its audience and make its content findable and shareable on social networks, the site uses a mix of smart, search-engine and social media friendly headlines.

The revenue mix

To make Firstpost a success, it also needed a strong business to support its strong voice.

From its launch, advertising was always seen as the main source of revenue. Raghunath explained that in India, apart from business content, very few paid-content strategies have been successful.

However, while advertising is the focus of revenue for Firstpost, the team is experimenting with a range of digital advertising techniques. “Advertisers want compelling experiences not boring banners,” she said.

Raghunath said that Firstpost’s revenue is split between volume- and brand-based advertising. Volume-based advertising is based on advertisers who want to reach a large audience, and brand-based advertising is based on advertisers who want to be associated with the media brand you create.

To attract volume advertising, the site first needed to hit a million pageviews per month based on comScore statistics before they could have a seat at the table with the big budget advertisers. The traffic target will vary market to market, but it is important to know what you have to aim for to get the attention of major ad agencies and advertisers where you publish.

Raghunath said that Firstpost was always about building a media brand – a brand with “presence and voice that keeps its promise of being smart and sticky.” That has allowed the site to attract international brands, such as European car manufacturers, looking to tap into the Indian market.

As the site has grown, advertisers have also started “buying audiences” – advertising bought to reach a specific audience. This is only possible because Firstpost’s sales team has built an audience profile using web metrics services, such as Google Analytics and comScore, and social media metrics services, such as Facebook Analytics and Klout, which measures the influence of social media users.  They have also worked to understand their audience not just online, but also offline through reader surveys.

Raghunath stresses that Firstpost is constantly evolving. Since the launch, they have explored sub-brands and niches, such as real estate, that could help bring the site new revenue.

Selling social

The team has used social media effectively not just to keep the site at the centre of conversations, but also to leverage that success with their advertisers.

The micro-blogging service Twitter is hugely popular in India, and just as Twitter is trying to generate revenue through sponsored content, so is Firstpost. Firstpost has developed its own sponsored updates system on Twitter, letting their audience clearly know which tweets are sponsored by including the hashtag #advertiserlove.

“The reader should never feel that (advertising) has been stuffed down their throat,” Raghunath said.  They are experimenting with sponsored posts on the site, but Raghunath says they are doing so very cautiously. Audiences are very sensitive to sponsored content, and she said that they have developed very clear guidelines to govern its use.

One of the more successful experiments has been Firstpost debates, in which two writers take opposing positions and audiences vote for which one they found more persuasive. Thousands of Firstpost readers have voted in the debates, and the site’s sales team is now looking to develop revenue streams around this popular feature.

This experimentation with new forms of advertising is helping Firstpost meet both its editorial and business goals.

As we said last month, the launch of a digital product is the beginning, not the end, of its development. Firstpost has been constantly evolving during its fast-paced first year. Raghunath’s advice for other digital news ventures is that it is important to start small and with a reasonably sized news staff: “Never staff for your end goal, but optimise your staffing stage by stage.”  And when you are launching, and your resources are limited, you should always invest in what differentiates you from your competitors. Firstpost’s distinctiveness has been key to its success.

Disclosure: I was involved with the launch of Firstpost and until recently was a writer-at-large for the site.

The challenge for Facebook, for example, is two-fold. While India might be sprinting ahead of the rest of the world in terms of market size, Facebook captures much lower revenue per user outside of its US base. Before it floated on the market, Facebook revealed its revenue per user statistics: In the US and Canada, it earns $9.51, but in Europe, it earns only $4.86 per user. In Asia, that figure drops to $1.79 and even lower for the “rest of the world”, a mere $1.42. Some, but not all, of that difference in revenue per user is down to lower per capita incomes.

Another reason for the lower revenue is that Facebook users in rapidly developing economies access the site on mobile at much higher rates than in North America, and Facebook has been struggling to generate revenue on mobile at levels approaching what it makes from computer users. Nowhere is this a bigger challenge for Facebook than in India.

Targeting young people, Facebook has grown rapidly in India, at a pace of 22 percent every six months. Toward the end of 2014, India will equal, if not exceed, the US when both countries are expected to have 170 million to 175 million members.

India’s wired internet infrastructure is poor, so users have little choice but to turn to the mobile web. It is estimated that 30 percent of Facebook users there access it via mobile devices. And although there is a huge market for mobile ads in social media, Facebook itself is not sure whether its mobile business is working, even in developed countries such as US and UK. Currently, Facebook does not generate any meaningful revenue via mobile.

Like many other internet companies, not to mention news organisations, Facebook is looking for a way to monetise its huge and growing mobile audience. The social network has just started to introduce ads to its mobile version, including sponsored updates in users’ Facebook news feeds. Controversially, Facebook is also considering using ad targeting based on its users’ mobile app usage.

Facebook has to figure out how to turn its millions of comments, recommendations and likes into revenue. In addition to ads, it is exploring ways to allow people to buy clothing, furniture, music, a book, other content or goods when a friend has liked it. All you would need to do is click, and Facebook would direct you to where you can buy the item as part of an affiliate sales program. Facebook could become the ultimate social shopping engine, giving Amazon’s recommendation system and e-commerce juggernaut a run for its money.

As we’ve noted before, audiences are moving to mobile, but advertising revenues often lag behind the growth of digital platforms. News organisations need to make sure that they don’t cede this important digital space to search engines and social networks when it comes to developing new revenue. News organisations also need to explore the idea of moving beyond advertising to affiliate sales and other transactional business models to add to their digital revenue.

South African journalists are already using social media to promote and distribute their work, but they also need to tap audiences in social media for their expertise and experiences. It will help journalists reach out to new audiences and deepen their relationship with existing viewers and readers.

Recent research conducted by Ipsos GmbH, TNS Infratest and the Mobile Marketing Association found that 63% of South African smartphone users access social networks daily. The most popular social network is Facebook, which has about 4.2-million users, followed closely by LinkedIn and Twitter with around 1.1-million South African users. Undoubtedly, the medium plays a crucial role in setting and shaping news agenda.

According to a 2011 report from Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism looking at how people found and engaged with news and information in the US: “If searching for news was the most important development of the last decade, sharing news may be among the most important of the next.” The same could be said for internet users worldwide. Many people use social networks not only to connect with friends but also to filter and find news and information that is of interest to them. Their social networks become an editorial filter through which they see the world, a filter defined not by the editorial voice of a publication but rather shared interests with their friends and other contacts on social networks.

In its 2012 State of the News Media report, Pew suggested that we should keep this activity in perspective. Certainly, social networks are being used as pathways to news, but that doesn’t mean that users are completely foregoing more traditional ways of finding news.

… these social media news consumers have not given up other methods of getting news, such as going directly to websites, using apps or through search. In other words, social media are additional paths to news, not replacements for more traditional ones.

Even so, Facebook pages are now often the most popular pages for the top news sites. Media experts in South Africa have realized that the traditional media have been overtaken by social media outlets.  Wadim Schreiner, owner of Media Tenor South Africa, notes:

Standing titles like the Sunday Times, City Press as well as Mail & Guardian were quoted less by other media. While Facebook was quoted around 70 times by traditional media in 2010 and Twitter just over 50 times, Twitter scored 500 mentions and Facebook just over 400 in 2011.

Today, journalism needs to understand audience engagement and participation. A more engaged audience is a more loyal audience, and as the sources of information increase in the digital era, loyalty has to be a key strategic goal for news organisations. News outlets need to realise that their website is the central hub in a network of sites and services that will help them reach new audiences and build a more loyal audience. Audiences are finding news and discussing it with their friends on Facebook and other social media.

“What is concerning about the figures is less the fact that social media is being seen as a news source than that Twitter is itself becoming the news,” said Schreiner. He was worried that small but vocal groups on social networks like Twitter, could distort the news agenda. This isn’t a new phenomenon and as social media increases, journalists will need to understand how political parties, politicians, campaign groups and other interests use social media. Such groups have realised that social media can help them achieve their social and political goals. Rather than bemoaning this new development, journalists simply need to increase their awareness of these activities and the sophistication with which they report them.

Social media also offers a precise way of identifying and reaching out to potential audiences. It not only helps reporters and journalists to build an audience, but also helps to maintain and attract audiences through constant engagement. Many reporters have built up a rapport with key “tweeps”, contacts on Twitter, in areas they focus on. These key tweeps share a lot of news sources with a set of their own followers, which a reporter can count on to listen to and pass on their message. As audiences and political activity move online, journalists need to be at the front of this trend so they can stay relevant, reach new audiences and deepen the loyalty of current audiences.

A relationship is worth a hundred or a thousand times an impression – or more – depending on how you monetize it.

As Syed Karim, Media Development Loan Fund Director of Innovation and Digital Strategies, said in the last Digital Briefing, news and media organisations are “relationship engines”, and it is critical to manage the “relationship between the audience that they have created and advertisers who want to access that audience” now that it is possible to do so without relying on just having an interrupting ad here or there across a newspaper page.

Newspapers and other news outlets have traditionally been one of the best ways to reach an audience because they attract large numbers of readers, listeners and viewers. But digital media offer advertisers new ways to reach audiences and many news organisations are lagging behind their audiences in making the transition. This disconnection means many news groups have squandered the advantage they once had in the relationship with their audiences, and in doing so have lost a key selling point to advertisers: those relationships.

But how to monetize a relationship?  Ben Elowitz gives five steps:

• “Create an offering that can’t be price-shopped or commoditized.” Create truly original ad products.
• “Create an offering that can’t be measured in one-time conversions.” Allow brand advertising, not just click-throughs.  Right now only 40% of ad spending online is allocated to brand advertising, compared to 90% in offline markets.
• “Create an offering that enhances rather than compromises the user experience.” Keep the user-experience first.
• “Create an offering that closely guards the data.”
• “Create a supernetwork that has no borders.”

As news media organizations start assessing how they can get a bigger chunk of online advertising revenue, they should consider the relationships they have with their audience and discover ways to capitalize on that, rather than just focusing on impressions and click throughs.

Based on comScore’s latest data, more than 127.3 m Latin Americans over the age of 15 visited a social networking site in April – a 12 percent year-over-year increase. Not only is the traffic high, but so is the amount of time Latin Americans spend on these sites – on average 7.5 hours a month with one in every four minutes online spent on Facebook.

While use of social networking sites increased 12 percent overall, visitors to Facebook specifically grew 37 percent. Social media consultancy Socialbakers says that South America is the continent with the fastest growth in Facebook use, with Brazil, Argentina, Colombia and Venezuela representing the fastest growing countries. Currently 19% of all Facebook users live in Latin America, according to Socialbakers, and 33% of these users are between the age of 18 and 24. Facebook is such an outlier in terms of the amount of time spent on its site that it, in many ways, distorts the top line social media use figures reported by comScore. Users spent an average of 460 minutes per month on Facebook compared to just 96.6 minutes on Google’s Orkut, which is ranked second in terms of time on site amongst social networking sites in Latin America.

One caveat with this data is that it does not include public access computers, such as internet cafés, or mobile devices. While the lack of data from internet cafés has been a major problem with the data in the past, the lack of mobile device data is likely to be the bigger error now as mobile use, especially smartphone use, increases dramatically.

Regardless, with the increasing amount of time spent on social networks, they can be seen as a threat to news organisations as they battle for digital attention. In 2010, Nielsen found that while US internet users were spending similar amounts of time to Latin American users on social networking sites, about seven hours a month, they were spending, on average, only 20 minutes a month on the New York Times site and even less time, 8 to 12 minutes a month, on local news sites. As analyst Ken Doctor pointed out at the time, “that’s some 40 times more time spent on social sites than on any single news site.”

However, social networks can also be an opportunity. Forward thinking news organisations, such as The Guardian, have tapped into this new trend. Social networks now trump search engines, such as Google, in driving traffic to Guardian content, and they have allowed The Guardian to reach younger audiences who might not have been coming to their website in the past.

Reaching this growing online audience is key to your future success. In the early days of digital media, it was enough to have a website.  But now, while your website remains your primary digital presence, it is not the hub of a network, which must be connected to audiences who spend an increasing amount of time on social networks. You can take advantage of the social media revolution by making your content easy to share and recommend on social networks and also actively engaging audiences on these networks by having pages on Facebook and having journalists and editors interact with your audiences on social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.

Facebook is the global leader when it comes to social networks, but if you dig a little deeper, you find that the world isn’t simply dominated by it and the other major US social media player, Twitter. Vincenzo Cosenza has been analysing Google and Alexa data to determine the top social networks in more than 100 countries and although his map for June 2012 shows a sea of Facebook blue, there is space for other players – including news organisations – to deliver new services. Cosenza said:

Facebook with more than 845 million active users has established its leadership position in 126 out of 137 countries analyzed (in this edition I’ve added Uganda).

It’s a much different map than in 2009, when you still had major regional players such as the pioneering networks of Hi5, Orkut and Friendster, not to mention networks like Mixi and South Korea’s virtual world player Cyworld. Of course, in Russia and China in 2012, Facebook doesn’t dominate. In Russia, Odnoklassniki (Classmates) and vKontakte rank number one and two. In fact, in China, Facebook is nowhere to be seen. Instead, local networks such as Qzone, Tencent Weibo and Sina Weibo rank one, two and three. Weibo are the popular Twitter-like micro-blogging services.

However, just because Facebook dominates, doesn’t mean that it has completely defeated other networks, and it’s interesting to look at what kind of social networks are running in the number one and two spots. In several countries including Australia, Germany, Denmark and Finland, professional social networks such as LinkedIn and Xing are in the number two or three spot. Another popular type of network is dating-based social networks such as Badoo.

Professional networks and dating services don’t just hold an opportunity for social networks but can also be an opportunity for news organisations to develop digital products that can bring much needed revenue to support journalism. Many news organisations including The Guardian in the UK and Australian group Fairfax have successfully developed dating services that are the digital age equivalent of the personal ads in newspapers. News organisations should think of other ways to create digital versions of services they offer now or have offered in the past as they make the digital transition.

(via CNET and The Next Web)