Guide #4 – Facebook News Feed Changes: Impact and Actions, by Ross Settles.

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About author: Ross Settles, MDIF Senior Advisor for Digital Media, is an adjunct professor of digital media and entrepreneurship at Hong Kong University’s Journalism and Media Studies Center. He consults to media and investment firms on business development and marketing strategies. Ross worked with MDIF client Malaysiakini, the largest independent online news portal in Malaysia. His work with Malaysiakini focused on new online products and services as part of a yearlong Knight International Journalism Fellowship. Ross previously managed the online business and editorial operations for Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post and directed marketing and business development for Knight Ridder Digital. Before Knight Ridder, Ross led marketing and international development efforts for technology media company Red Herring Communications, and worked in marketing and product development with Times Mirror, the owner of the Los Angeles Times. Ross holds a Masters in Business Administration from the University of Chicago and a Bachelor of Arts in East Asian studies from Princeton University. He has spent over a decade in China and East Asia, and speaks, reads and writes Mandarin Chinese.

You can contact him via e-mail.

Well, no. Publishers are finding themselves at the wrong end of an uneven, unhealthy bargain, which is bad news for both news business economics and quality, pluralistic information.

“This is a really depressing, dystopian way to think about publishers and platforms. It only really makes sense if you view writing as a fungible commodity,” says John West in Quartz. For the synergy logic to work, a piece of journalism must be viewed as an ad unit, its value being no more and no less than how many clicks it generates. Even more depressing for West is that Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and all other platforms view journalism in this way – they can see the cost (or potential revenues) of quality content, but not the value – and “that’s going to smother journalistic independence and the open web”.

The platforms have created such seamlessly efficient ways to deliver content that news publishers will soon have no need even to have a website. Facebook’s Instant Articles, Apple News, Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages, Twitter’s Moments, Snapchat – they provide comfortable, contained experiences, perfectly tailored for mobile, which is the direction audiences are headed. While the bare audience numbers make sense in the short term, warns West, “it will cost you”.

By granting control of content to Facebook and its like, publishers are turning platforms into the world’s gatekeepers to information, and these risk-averse megacorps already have a less than glittering track record of speaking truth to power and promoting diverse views.

It also means that publishers become ever more reliant on clicks: they only have worth to the platform if they bring in the traffic. The implication for quality is clear: as publishers become wire services for platforms, they lose their unique voice, their identity and their connection with their own audience. Editorial output has to match the platform’s audience, so publishers are incentivized to create bland, populist or clickbait brand of news. This means that a publisher’s traditional audience trusts them less and, with the context removed (knowing that an article was produced by The Guardian or The New Republic is an important part of the reading experience), an article has less meaning.

West also laments that “we’re also losing the organic and open shape of the web. It’s becoming something much more rigid and more hierarchical.”

“The answer is simple, but it isn’t easy,” he concludes. “We need to stop pretending that content is free. Publications need to ask readers to pay for their content directly, and readers need to be willing to give up money, as opposed to their privacy and attention. This means that publications will have to abandon the rapid-growth business models driven by display ads, which have driven them to rely on Facebook for millions of pageviews a month.”

John Herman in The Awl take a look at another aspect of the unfolding battle between publishers and platforms. Platforms like Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook and Google are creating their own editorial spaces and, in some cases, standalone apps, but are wrestling with what content to put there. With the platforms not having a clear content plan or even what audiences they want to serve, it leaves publishers with the headache of having to ask: “What do these platforms want from us? What will they then want for themselves? What will be left for the partners?” This is an uncomfortable place for publishers to be.

Herman points out that over the past few years, publishers have been providing platforms like Facebook with huge volumes of free content in exchange for big audiences and, occasionally, revenues. However, he warns that Facebook is simultaneously intent on destroying this same advertising system.

Platforms are sucking in the ad revenues that used to go to web advertising that helped support publishers. “These new in-house editorial projects located at the center of the platform, rather than at its edges, will succeed or fail based on how they assist in that project—not according to how well they replicate or replace or improve on publications supported by a model they’re in the process of destroying.”

Publishers be warned.

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.”

Every new website faces a daunting problem: “How do I get people to visit my site?” Most websites have only a handful of options. They can spend money to promote their brand and URL through advertising networks and other websites, bringing traffic to the site directly. They can invest in developing their content management system and their online reporting techniques to draw traffic from Google and other search engines, commonly called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Or they can build a social media following on Twitter, Facebook or any of the dozens of other specialized social media platforms available today that refer traffic to the website. This last technique is often called Social Media Marketing. When planning a new website, each of these audience development techniques should be planned into all aspects of the site – content, software and hosting.

When Ujyaalo 90 Network in Nepal began planning their online presence in 2011, they faced a problem. Google, the dominant search engine in Nepal, was still relatively under-developed in the Nepali language, the primary language of Ujyaalo 90. They faced an environment in which depending on Google alone to drive traffic might not show immediate results. In addition, they faced a market that was moving online quickly, but predominantly through mobile phones. So after internal discussion and analysis, Ujyaalo Online developed a plan to build their Facebook fan base as their primary online marketing tool. Facebook gave them access to Nepal’s rapidly growing online audience and a familiar mobile platform to build on. SEO was also pursued but only as part of the development of the site’s content management system. The timeline below explains how Ujyaalo used Facebook to grow into one of Nepal’s largest social media and online media outlets.

When did you first start integrating PolicyMic with Facebook and Twitter, and why?

Well, the company was founded in 2011 and as soon as it started they already had Facebook and Twitter. I initially worked doing SEO, basically whatever is trending on Google. So my experience with PolicyMic initially was driving organic traffic to the site from Google. Even at that point, 2011, there was still a separation between Google and facebook. We wrote articles and posted them on the blog and we posted them on Facebook and we posted them on Twitter. Now, I think that is totally integrated. Even when you think about which topics to write about, you have to already think how is it going to be tweeted, how is it going to shared on Facebook, what are the key works that work – basically how you present, or how you curate, that content on Facebook and Twitter. So going back to my old path there. Probably last year, 2012, probably in November, I switched to doing just Facebook and Twitter. Facebook and twitter are main social networks. Facebook is much larger. We have typically 50-60 percent of traffic comes from Google. We have 7 million visits a month. So we are growing. We are still not the Huffington Post, which is like 15 million or something. So we get a little bit more than two thirds from Google and then social traffic is the rest, like 30 plus percent is Facebook, and Twitter is much smaller than that. So of our social pie, Facebook is probably two thirds, and then one third is Twitter. When there is a news event or people are tweeting a lot, or one of our articles goes viral on Twitter, we get much more traffic form Twitter that week or month, but still Facebook is the main thing for now. And we do have Pinterest and Tumblr and Goggle+, but the traffic we drive from there is not that significant at all. For us it is more like a presence at this point.

Do you see an increase of the people that are referred from social media?

Yes, definitely. For the last year social traffic has grown. It has been slowly but steady.

What about traffic from Google?

It is growing too. As we get older we get a better ranking on Google, our stories get ranked better, so we will keep getting more traffic, hopefully, from Google.

What about direct?

That started out really, really small, and now it is getting larger.

So it is really just direct, Google and Facebook that drive traffic to your news site?

Yes, and then Twitter and Facebook are different. Like I said before, we used to post a blog and then post a story and then post it on Facebook. Now we are actually creating content specifically for Facebook. We are just like any other company or organization that has adjusted their social media efforts over time. What worked yesterday does not necessarily work tomorrow. It is very unstable like that. But I want to close with Twitter and Facebook saying that the content people share on Facebook is more targeted to emotions. Or if you are the first to break a news story, it is just going to go crazy. One example is the Boston bombing. Someone tweeted a photo on Twitter right away and posted it on Facebook and it got shared like crazy. And then Facebook gives you the alternative that if you post a photo you can actually edit the blur, so you can just break a story on Facebook and then you can just link it to your post and it keeps going viral. So that is one way of getting Facebook traffic.

So you don’t post an article on your news site and then share it with a headline and a link on Facebook?

That is what we used to do. And think that is fine. But now we are trying the exploit the breaking news aspect of Facebook. So if, let’s say, they pass gay marriage, right. If you are one of the first pages to break it, it is going to go viral. But if you in a week from now post a story saying, ‘this is the legislation, this is what it means, and this is how it is going to work, and you post that on Facebook, it is not going to go anywhere because people have already heard about it all week. You also won’t get a lot of traffic posting a story that is not breaking but is kind of like a divisive story – women’s rights, gay marriage, abortion, religion – it’s a no no! You do get engagement from comments. (On Facebook you have different ways of measuring your impact, and it is going to depend on your strategy and whatever you are looking for. You can have likes, you can have shares, you can have comments.) But from these political, divisive issues you don’t get a lot of likes. You get a lot of comments and they are very toxic. By toxic I mean, you have to monitor it, making sure it is not something crazy, outrageous that you have to hide or delete. It is really not worth, going that way – for us right now, for our sort of objective company. For other ultra liberal or ultra conservative news companies that have really passionate followings, they of course are going to get all that traffic. But for us right now, that is not what we are doing.

So where do you see any kind of business opportunities emerge on these platforms for a news company?

Hm, I don’t work in the sales department. But we use Twitter to get more engagement and create more awareness of our brand. Our brand is becoming more well-know because of Twitter where we get tweeted and retweeted by professional polits or TV personalities, and huge traffic from that. So in that sense, it helps our brand. And then you have the chance to connect and network with other media. Yesterday, we had a mention in the New York Times, in one of the columns. So we got to interact on Twitter with the writer, Charles Blow, so in that sense that was a way to create awareness about our news brand. Absolutely!

What about loyalty? Do you think people that interact on Facebook and Twitter tend to be engaged with your site, or be more loyal readers?

Well, I found out that Facebook is probably a better place to create loyalty than Twitter – just because Twitter is very fast and the feeds come by the second. But you do get, I guess… The way we started our brand is sort of like crowd sourced knowledge or opinion for and by millennials, so in the same way our social presence is very crowd sourced in the sense that I’m in charge of PolicyMic’s Twitter feed, but let’s say some story get published, then more than just me tweeting this story on behalf of PolicyMic, I would rather have the same writer who wrote the story, tweet it from his or her personal social media account so you can see the face of the writer, and then his or her following gets that crowd sourced feeling. So there is loyalty in the sense that there is going to Twitter users that are interested in women’s right so every time our women’s right, writers post something or tweet something there is going to be that engagement; they are going to retweet it or they are going to reply, and there is going to a conversation based on that article and whatever hashtag about what people are for, or against. Like for example, they think Monsanto is awful or they love Monsanto, or whatever it is. You have people constantly engaging in the news.

And do you see that benefitting the financial viability of your website?

Well, again Twitter is a smaller piece of our social traffic pie, but that is an interesting question. We have some writers prefer to … at the bottom of their article they say follow me on Twitter or get in on the conversation on Twitter. Some people feel that it is going to take away comments from the actual comment section on our site, and other people on the contrary people believe that is going to compound the whole thing. I think more the latter. I do believe that the more interaction outside our site is good as long as you constantly have your social presence connected to your site, constantly trying to refer people back to your site, and vice versa – to your Twitter feed and your Facebook page.

So what do you do on your site to connect your Facebook page and Twitter feed to it?

Well, right now we our redesigning our page. So we are going to have much more social buttons all over the place. We don’t have as many right now. Also we encourage our writers to a) under their Twitter bio say, ‘I write for Policy Mic’, so you can click at it and get directly back to our site, and b) on our site we have writers saying at the button of their article, ‘follow me on Twitter’ or ‘these are the topics that I’m interested in on Twitter’, so basically trying to bounce that traffic back and fourth. That is the goal.

Do you see that happening right now?

Yes, social traffic is definitely increasing from Twitter. But it is also a matter of working along side the writers, sort of like coaching them on Twitter as well. Not a lot of people are on Twitter and if they are they don’t tweet as often. So we constantly give our writers tips on how to get better at Twitter. To me, it is supposed to leverage your audiences. And the way I see our Twitter and Facebook feeds right know, is almost like another section of our site. So we have politics, we have feminism, we have international and then I see Facebook and Twitter as just some sections that we create content for and get traffic back from.

So the type content that sits well with people on social media sites is more like breaking news, you said?

Yes, for Twitter it is breaking news, and also social groups the users belong to and identify with. So if you grew up an immigrant, or you are a European, or gay, or fighting for women’s rights, anything, African-Americans, Latinos. If it is things that people feel strongly about they are going to take action. That is what social media is about, triggering action. It is not about people looking at their feed thinking whatever. But it is about getting them to reply or retweet.

So you send out something on social media sites to creation action?

Absolutely. That should be the goal.

Does every journalist from PolicyMic dedicate a specific amount of time to Facebook and Twitter?

We post 100 articles per day right now, so every time an article comes out … well, we publish one hundred and … you know, on Twitter you can tweet everything, it doesn’t matter. But on Facebook, we have to space it out. Otherwise people would see it as spam. So you don’t get to post everything that you want on Facebook.

Why is that different?

I think it is because there are much more tweets, there are like million of tweets. On Facebook people post whatever on their personal pages, but for a brand you could risk being annoying or polarizing. It is a reason for people to just unfollow.

But that doesn’t happen on Twitter?

I don’t think so. On Facebook you may have like 500 or 700 friends, on Twitter people have 20,000 so the turn around is much faster. The thing with social media is, you know, we all use social media more of less, so when you send out news you have to put yourself in the user’s shoes, thinking what annoys you, what would you like, what would you tweet and retweet. So I guess, you have less Facebook friends and you may think that the first article about IRS or Obama is great, but the when the second one comes, you think what is next, I’m over it. So for that reason we don’t get to post as many articles on Facebook. So instead we post a story and then we also post an infographic or some image from a company or a peer research, so we don’t get perceived as too pushy or self-promoting or self-serving – that annoys people, and they will just unfollow you. So for that reason you cant really push everything on Facebook. And that is what I fight with editors and writers about every day. They are like, ‘post my article, post my article’. Also, Facebook is very performance based, so if you want to keep it free your posts have to perform. So you post something and it gets all these likes, then the next post is going to have a large audience. But if you post something that doesn’t get a lot of reaction, your next post is going to get just a couple of likes, just forget it. It is just going to reduce your audience. I know you can pay for it by getting people to promote your posts, but we are not on that phase yet. At some point we will start doing it. But for us right now it is just about making our content perform well, so we can get as much traffic as possible. The same as we did, and keep doing, with Google.

So was it the individual journalist or you that share the news on social media?

Both. But in my ideal world, the journalists are very engaged on social media and have a large following, so they can always post their own articles. Again, it comes back to leverage, you know. It is much better if we have a community where people engage, than having only one or two person engage. It is an exponential-effect. That is what social media and viral reality is about. It is basically exponential, you know, two times four, and then six and then eight. So that would be ideal.

How many hours a day do you think the average journalists from PolicyMic spend on Facebook and Twitter right now?

Hm, I will say, uh … uh, probably three to four hours a day on average. Again, we are sort of changing into an integrated, simultaneous culture, where you have a tap open on your site, a tap open on Twitter, a tap open on Facebook, etc. because you are constantly getting ideas from Facebook as well as breaking news from Twitter that is feeding into your news feed. So it is not anymore about writing one article and then posting it, it is more like … do you know, those tweet-curated sites? One of them is called TweetSheet. It is basically a blog that, instead of writing about some news story, mine Twitter for the power users and the actual sources tweeting about it in real time, and then they lay out all the tweets. That is how they tell the whole story. I think that is where media is going. So that is where PolicyMic should be going, I think. So it really has to be simultaneous. With Twitter being so instantaneous and so fast, if you disconnect for a couple of hours to write a story, you have things happening and changing in the meantime with your story. So it is just going be faster and more real-time. It kind of sucks because you have pros and cons. You may have to comprise with accuracy and so on. You saw it with the Boston bombing where CNN and the big ones were on fire.

Do you have any benchmarks for success with your strategies on Facebook and Twitter?

Well, our strategy is to drive as much traffic as possible. We have ads of course, but we also have investors, venture capitals, so they are going to be looking at the numbers and the reach – social and Google. So for us, it is about driving as much high-quality traffic in our demographic, which is millennialls. In the past, we were doing stuff with pop culture and driving all this traffic from celebrities. And it was great. We had a lot of traffic. But it is not necessarily one hundred percent in tune with our mission and with our demographic.

So you are looking mostly at volume metrics?

Yes definitely. But also … I guess another business opportunity would be to partner with other similar news news sites and personalities, or even larger sites like the New York Times. Just to keep that engagement with them and hopefully get them to mention our brand on their much larger sites so we can bring even more traffic and also even more people to write for our site, which will in turn help our brand. We have posts from Paul Franc, the former congress man from Massachusetts, Paul Ryan, the senator that is probably going to be the presidential candidate, Clare Macasgo, etc. It has been great because, for instance Senator Clare Macasgo wrote about sexual assaults in the military, so we gained not only specific traffic concerned with that particular issue, and internal engagement on Twitter and Facebook, but also … we were one of the first sites to report on that news story, and it became a big issue in the mainstream media, so that was a gain for us in terms of traffic and brand wise – having our name associated with a United State senator. It gives us a lot of credibility.

So in that way social media helps you attract advertisers?

Yes, I guess. Because if you want to sell a product to millennialls, and you see that the United State senator is writing on our page, it probably has more credibility than more amateurish college blogs – not that there is something wrong with these blogs and all companies have different targets, like … but I guess in that sense, I mean, I haven’t seen the actual metrics on how social media has helped bring in more brands, but if browse on our site you are going to see big brands advertise on a regular basis. So I think it has made a positive business opportunity.

Do you think social engagement metrics will help attract advertisers?

Yes, I guess from an advertiser’s point of view you want to see the numbers on their traffic, but also their Facebook and Twitter feeds. You want so see how many fans, followers and likes they have, and if people interact on every single post. I’m not in advertising but we do advertising ideas in a way, so I would say the more social engagement you have, the better for attracting advertisers and also business opportunity partnerships. Right now, we have a potential partnership in the works with one of the big media companies, so in way they have been able to find us because of tweets or Facebook posts they saw somewhere, a share and then they tracked back to the site. So absolutely!

To answer your question about if it is worthwhile to engage in these social networks, I would say as long as it is free and easy to use, absolutely. Beside free and easy to use, the advantage is that you can pretty much mole that into your mission statement or your brand identity. And Twitter is just like … I can’t tell people enough how amazing Twitter is. I started on Twitter in 08, and people didn’t get it and it annoyed me a little bit. But I would say stick with it, get into it because not only do you get these business opportunities, it’s basically like you have a real time focus group in your pocket, in your Twitter app. Anything you want to know about anything basically you can see there. You see what kind of opinions people have in real time. It is probably not terribly scientific as a pole, but still it is very useful.

So Twitter is more about feeling what is out there, getting to know your audience, whereas Facebook from a business perspective is a generator of traffic?

Yes, well, Twitter is also about breaking news like the Boston marathon. So you keep tweeting about it and if you do it the right way, you get a lot of mentions and retweets and favorites, which is going to rank your tweets up. So people who are searching for some news story will see your tweets first. So it is all about keeping your ranking up there, just like on Google. Twitter is the same. And yes, you basically want to keep an engaged and hopefully large audience.

But since Twitter is not as much a generator of traffic, it is still worthwhile for a news company to integrate with from a business perspective?

Yes, for us it is not that large, but there are other news sites that get all there traffic from Twitter because they have a different strategy and different missions and different approaches. I don’t know if you know Buzzfeed – it is a viral blog. Almost 100 percent of there traffic is from Facebook as opposed to Google. So it depends on how you approach it. But even if you don’t generate traffic from Twitter, you create a lot of brand awareness, or…

Yes, but you kind of need the traffic to create brand awareness as well. If you don’t get a lot of traffic, they won’t be aware. But if people retweet your content, your brand will get around on Twitter, right?

Yes, absolutely! But you better realize that there are a lot of people that get their news from their Twitter feeds, who don’t necessarily go to your site. So I guess in that sense you definitely need to be out there. Ideally, you have a lot of engagement and brand presence. But people are going to be searching. They are going to search “New York Times Facebook” because they want to go to that particular company Facebook page or Twitter page. I don’t know exactly how many, but I don’t see a lot of people doing that, so I would say that it is probably decreasing that you go to a browser and then directly to nytimes.com as opposed to going to a news aggregator, like FlipBoard or Twitter or Facebook. Some times they even break the news first on Twitter, like the AP [Associated Press] for instance they break it there seconds before they break it on the actual site, so getting in the mix of Twitter totally makes sense.

Do you see any disadvantages of integrating with Facebook and Twitter? Any risks that you may be taking?

Uh, well, I would say, you risk being inaccurate in the name of being fast and being first, which is not going to change. We are a for-profit company, we are running a business, so we need the traffic, we need to make the calls everyday, we are going to try to break the news first. There is going to be some risks, like, you have to say this information may not be confirmed yet, or if the New York Times said or the CNN said it, you say it. So I guess the disadvantage for your brand is that if you are trying to be a respected news organization. But I guess that is the risk that you have to learn how to manage, because people are going to be tweeting, and as much as the users are going to complain, they are going to be the first to search for breaking news on Twitter. They want to be the first to get the information to tell their friends or coworkers. You don’t want to be the last guy knowing that Michael Jackson died. You want to be the first one, so people can say “holly shit”. So yes, that would be a downside.

Do you think there is a risk in linking out your news items on social media or to other news aggregators? Perhaps, readers won’t come back to your site.

Yes, that is something you also have to work on. I worked on mobile advertising before and we had these conversions. People actually pay per-click in that business. So you actually want that traffic coming back to your site, and not only do you want them to come back to your site, you want them to perform an action, whether it is buying something or, in our case, share the news story. So you definitely want that, and that is tricky. But I don’t think it is different from traditional advertising, where you have to track how many people come to your products, and how do you do that? I guess that is also another risk internally. It depends on how you measure your success.

How do you do that?

Like I said before, ideally it is about driving traffic to our site. Secondary, it is about increasing our social media footprint. So even if a hundred percent of people from that tweet or that post don’t come to our site, if their friends see on their profiles that someone liked a PolicyMic article that is still a win for us, because maybe that person will be like, “oh that looks interesting.” The bottom line is driving traffic into a site. And if you are selling products, you better have people auditing that product. That is the bottom line.

So are you actually taking a bigger risk not being on these platforms?

Absolutely! As long as it stays free and easy to use. They have huge audiences that you can reach. I mean, how could you not want to reach that? Any downside that it could have, the benefits totally outweigh. Going back to your question if it is worthwhile for a news company to spend human capital or money on Facebook and Twitter, it is going to depend on your strategy, but you definitely should have a social media presence. Right now, on Pinterest and Tumblr we do have a smaller audience and we post, and every here and there a post go viral and we get traffic from that, but we don’t have people dedicated completely to these platforms. Maybe if we hire someone else, someone who can dedicate more time to Pinterest or Tumblr that would be great. But you have to allocate your resources depending on what your priorities are. So if you have one guy doing social media and if you see that you get much more traffic and conversions from Facebook than on Twitter, by all means invest more time and effort on Facebook, but do not neglect the other ones. And as you get more resources you can basically allocate them better. But I guess the bottom line is, how could you not be on social media, whether you are a NGO or a vitamin shop. You know, Jamba Juice they have all these promos and stuff that creates huge engagement. And they are not charging you for that on Facebook or Twitter. They could charge you for that. Facebook encourages you to use promoted posts, and yes if you have the budget and you want to promote posts by all means. The reason why Yahoo bought Tumblr is because they are now doing promoted posts, so they are going to start charging people who want to reach specific demographics. You know, it makes sense.

• Day 1 – Audience Development.    Day 1 focused on the two main techniques needed to build audience online search engine optimization and search engine marketing and social media optimization and social media marketing.  Special emphasis was placed on the use of Facebook and Twitter given the related importance of social media to Indonesian online users.

• Day 2 – Revenue Development. Day 2 focused on revenue development, in particular display advertising trends and standards, pricing approaches and the importance and structure of online media kits and rate cards.  The day ended with a discussion of the structure and role of advertising networks and the most important advertising networks available in Southeast Asia.

The seminar was designed to lay a foundation for audience and revenue development for KBR68H’s new online portal.

Location: Jakarta, Indonesia

Dates: 30 April – 1 May 2013

Attending:  Sales, Marketing and News Managers from PortalKBR.com

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.

How do I get more followers or fans? How do I encourage readers to share my stories?

At MDIF’s Media Forum 2012, I spoke with Srdan Kosovic, the online editor of Montenegro’s Vijesti, on how they found success.

“It was the trickiest question when we started, how to get new followers, how to get more likes,” he told us, but he cautioned, “You have to be careful with that. It’s all about what you want to do with those followers.”

It is not just about increasing page views and traffic but to include the audience in “the whole process of creating news”, he added.

Protests drive new social media strategy

The development of this strategy was sparked by protests in the country in January 2012. They were the largest protests in decades, he said, and they quickly realised that people wanted to be a part of sharing accurate, verified information.

Vijesti sent its own journalists, and like journalists elsewhere, they realised that using Twitter and Facebook and their mobile phones, they could report on the protests as they happened. They created a hashtag, a keyword preceded by the # symbol, on Twitter to gather the reports. It was based on a slogan used during the protest.

The reporting and the hashtag helped increase their following on Twitter. They encouraged people to send them pictures and information using the hashtag, and they promised to verify the reports that were sent to them.

“We said help us to do the best to cover the protests for the people who can’t come to the protests or watch them on TV,” he said. They didn’t ask people at the protests to help Vijesti but to help each other.

“The result was immense,” he said. “We got many new followers, many new connections between our followers and Vijesti’s portal.”

Vijesti benefitted by breaking new ground amongst Montenegrin news organisations in using social media in this way and to highlight the public’s use of social media in their coverage.

Listening to their new followers

One key lesson that many journalists quickly learn with social media is that it is not just about broadcasting your views and sharing your stories but also about getting feedback from your audience.

Of course, Vijesti does share their stories using social media, but Kosovic says that they do not share every story.

“We share those that we think are funny to be shared or retweeted but also important matters for the community so we can get more angles for the story and investigate deeper so that we can have an impact,” he said.

After the increase in fans and followers, Vijesti realised that they now had a way to directly contact members of their audience. The Twitter community in Montenegro is a relatively small and tight-knit group, which makes managing this engagement relatively easy.

They try to find out what expectations their followers have and why they decided to follow Vijesti, he said.

“We always reply to tweets. We always comment on interesting comments on Facebook. We even get direct messages (on Twitter) that aren’t related to Vijesti,” he added.

While this high level of engagement is showing obvious results for Vijesti, it might not be possible in countries with higher levels of social media use. For larger news organisations or simply news organisations that operate in very social media saturated countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia, it is probably more realistic that you have a community manager who helps manage the engagement and alert journalists to story ideas or comments they should respond to.

Kosovic knows that if their success at growing their social media following continues that they will need more resources, but for the moment, it is manageable. “We don’t want to go viral just to promote our brand. Of course, that is a part of it, but it is not only that. It is a process of meeting the expectation regarding trust and providing the right information at the right time.”

Offline community supports online engagement

Another way that Vijesti has worked to engage their social media fans is by attending Twitter parties. The idea actually came from the Montenegrin Twitter community, and they come together to watch a football match or television show and tweet about the event using a hashtag.

Kosovic said he and other people with the portal team went to the party to put a face to a Twitter name. It has deepened the relationship that started online, and now Vijesti’s Twitter followers know the people tweeting for the portal. “We get to meet them face to face. If I have a problem, I can now address you,” he said. “An institution always has a mask, and we try to remove the mask.”

The use of social media isn’t just in urban areas, participants in MDLF’s Media Forum 2012 in Jakarta were told.

Riza Primadi: In rural Indonesia people call smartphone "Facebook Phones." Gather where signal is stongest and use Facebook. #MDLF2012

— Harlan Mandel (@HarlanMandel) December 2, 2012

It’s estimated that 20 percent of Indonesians over the age of 14 now access the internet – some 30 m people, according to The Jakarta Post – and 70 percent of those 30 m people access Facebook each month.

Internet access and use is still concentrated in urban areas, but with second-hand smartphones and mobile internet access now reaching even remote areas of Indonesia,  the whole country is starting to go digital. One third of those who access the internet do so over their mobile phones. The revolution is not only digital but also mobile.

The revolution in digital media in Indonesia is not just about using Facebook. In a 2012 Nielsen report (PDF), Indonesia was ranked second in the world in a mobile video usage index.

Media companies there know they need to adapt to catch this digital wave, according to Bambang Harymurti, the CEO of Indonesia’s Tempo Media. However, just like catching a wave in surfing, riding the digital wave is all about the timing – too early or too late and media companies will miss it, he said.

Part of the challenge is technological. “You know the price of this technology is decreasing while its capacity is increasing,” he said. If you buy too early, you will have paid too much for technology that will quickly be out of date but, of course, if you are too late, you can also find yourself in trouble, he added. “You have to be just at the right time.”

To get the timing right, Harymurti said that media leaders need to take into account not only the digital usage of their audiences but also the extent to which advertisers have embraced digital.

“If you are a media leader, you need to cater both to your viewer or your reader and your advertisers,” he said.

What makes the timing even more challenging is that media audiences, readers or viewers, “are much more advanced” in using digital media than advertisers, he said.

The ratings agency Nielsen found a huge shift in media consumption in China, India and Indonesia. “This emerging group of consumers are young, they have grown up as a digital generation, and most have bypassed traditional technologies such as fixed-line telephones and desktop computers,” the Nielsen report found.

The report also found that while digital media use is rising rapidly across the region, digital advertising lags behind the global average of 14 percent share of total ad spend. In Indonesia, free-to-air television advertising dominates ad spending with digital trailing far behind television, newspapers and magazines.

Media leaders must find a way to bridge this gap between consumers shifting to digital and advertisers still focused on non-digital media.

Harymurti said that if media companies race out ahead with their audience, they might leave their advertisers behind, which means that they won’t have the revenue necessary to sustain their business. “That can kill you,” he said, highlighting the dilemma by adding, but “if you are too late, the viewer might leave you.”

In terms of advertisers, media companies should not simply wait for them to catch up with digital audiences. In Indonesia, like many markets, media companies have to educate advertisers about the opportunities that digital media provides, Harymurti said. “We have to be willing to invest a little bit to educate our advertisers.”

‘Unlearn your old model’

Timing isn’t the only challenge in the transition to digital. Harymurti also said:

The digital, which is going to be your future, is a different landscape. You have to have the ability to unlearn your model. This is sometimes the most difficult part. You don’t want to just put on digital the print format.

It’s a change in culture, often built on the workflow of previous media. Sometimes, to be able to change the culture, you will need new people with new skills, he said.

For instance, writing and producing a newspaper or a magazine has its own rhythm, a rhythm that might not be appropriate to the continuous demands of digital media. “To adapt to this, you have to destroy this old habit and build a new one,” he said, adding: “This is not easy, people do not like to be dragged out of their comfort zone.”

Meeting the mobile challenge

The challenge of digital is not static either. Initially, digital only meant producing content for a web browser, of which there are only a handful. However, with one third of Indonesians accessing the internet using a mobile phone, this also adds complexity to this shift to digital. Publishers need not only to adapt their content for smaller screens of mobile and smartphones, but they also must take into account the dizzying number of different handsets. Technology can help adapt your content, Harymurti said.

“What you read on one page in a magazine and what you read on one small screen is different. You have to find new ways to keep people reading more from one screen to another instead of one page to another or one column to another.”

Young people use their mobile phones primarily to talk to their friends on Facebook, but as they grow older they will want media, he says. To start that habit though, “we have to catch them on Facebook, catch them on Twitter, and hopefully get them to our site,” he said.

There is no textbook on how to do this so you have to try new things and see what works, he says, and what works today, may not work tomorrow.

“Technology changes. We have to be a very changeable management,” he said.

Monetising mobile audiences

While audiences are increasingly moving to mobile, consuming more content both on smartphones and tablets, just as they did with the desktop internet, advertisers have lagged behind audiences in shifting to digital.

French digital media strategist Frédéric Fillouxwrote this week:

Mobile audiences are large and growing. Great. But their monetization is mostly a disaster.

The situation will improve he added, but a number of things will have to happen. He’s optimistic that the situation will improve, but advertisers will have to take advantage of the unique features of mobile, including geolocation and the ability to scan bar codes to really unlock mobile’s revenue potential.

In Indonesia, the major shift has been Apple, iTunes and its content-selling service Newsstand. Even with Apple’s cut, about 50 percent he said, the revenue from a digital edition of their magazine or newspaper is still higher than it was in print. “We doubled our margin,” he said. They have also had success in selling a PDF version of their print content.

At the moment, older readers are more willing to pay for digital than younger audiences, he said. While they build their digital audiences, they are using this time to continue educating advertisers. By combining their print and digital circulation, they can make the case that advertisers can reach a larger audience than print alone.

For media leaders looking to start the digital transition, he said that they should seek investors who will help them build their capacity. “The digital world gives us a golden opportunity to reach more people in a much cheaper and faster way and, of course, that is our dream as journalists to reach as many people as possible.”

You might assume that your Facebook news feed is a simple list of every update posted by your friends, but in fact Facebook picks and chooses which updates you see using an algorithm called EdgeRank. TechCrunch has a good explanation of how EdgeRank works:

You may not realize it, but News Feed only displays a subset of the stories generated by your friends — if it displayed everything, there’s a good chance you’d be overwhelmed. Developers are always trying to make sure their sites and apps are publishing stories that make the cut, which has led to the concept of “News Feed Optimization”, and their success is dictated by EdgeRank.

EdgeRank tries to calculate which items will be most likely to please users based on the relationship between poster and reader, the type of content posted, and its recency. The success of your post, measured by how many of your followers see it, will rely on how well it meets EdgeRank criteria.

But Facebook is known for occasionally changing its EdgeRank algorithm. In September, two high profile social media marketers — Jeff Doak at Team Detroit and Geoffrey Colon at Social@Ogilvy — claimed that tweaks to the algorithm had slashed post visibility by 40 to 50 percent. That means that any given post now has a much lower likelihood of being seen by your followers than it did before the changes. Other websites have done the math on their own Facebook posts and have confirmed that this is a significant problem.

Why would Facebook do such a thing? One answer may be that by cutting access to fans, Facebook can push more companies into buying Promoted and Sponsored Posts, a new service that was launched in May. Says Ars Technica:

In some cases, Facebook clickthroughs are down by as much as half, despite a huge growth in likes. Even worse, some brands noticed that this drop in traffic coincided with a new Facebook feature called “promoted posts” through which brands can pay cold hard cash to push their content out to more news feeds than they would normally reach—and the brands are not happy about it.

This juxtaposition of events makes it look like Facebook is artificially driving down traffic, then holding the old level of traffic hostage in order to generate some new revenue.

Facebook denies any major change to its EdgeRank algorithm and maintains that it continues to get the most relevant posts on any individual’s newsfeed. Ultimately though, as Business Insider says:

The underlying issue, however, is that advertisers know that Facebook’s Edgerank algorithm can be adjusted in their favor or against them, and that only Facebook can choose how that level is set. And there’s nothing they can do about it.

Out of your control

It’s not the first time that Facebook’s tinkering has had an adverse impact on traffic to media sites. In April 2012, The Guardian and the Washington Post both saw a dramatic collapse in the number of people using their social reader apps. The Wall Street Journal, Mashable and MSNBC.com also saw their numbers fall off a cliff.

Initially it was thought that users had tired of Facebook’s ‘frictionless sharing’, in which the social network automatically shared with their friends the articles that users read, or that perhaps people had only experimented with new social reading apps for a brief time before abandoning them. But The Guardian’s Tanya Cordrey, director of digital development, told Nieman Labs that the problem lay squarely with Facebook:

Since our app launched in September last year we have repeatedly seen upswings and downswings in use depending on the type of content being shared by users, and the way that this user activity has been displayed within Facebook. Major changes made in the last month or so by Facebook have indeed resulted in a fall in usage since early April. However, this is not a signal that users are “abandoning” social reader apps, rather that articles which were previously surfaced predominantly in a user’s newsfeed are now much less visible.

Managing the risk

Any social media strategy that is overly focused on a single tool is unnecessarily risky, putting you at the mercy of a third party company over whom you have no control. In the case of EdgeRank, you could deal with the drop in traffic by just paying for promoted posts. But as an independent newsroom with a limited budget, it’s important to consider the likely return on any such investment, especially as it won’t guarantee the restoration of previous high levels of traffic. Even more importantly, though, such a move would not protect you from future changes by Facebook.

A more robust response is to mitigate the risk by diversifying your use of social media. Facebook isn’t the only game in town. Other social networks, such as Twitter, Pinterest, Vkontakte, or Google+ can also drive significant traffic to your site. Although it’s impossible to say whether or not any of them will charge for use in future, broadening your social media horizons will give you more choice if uncomfortable changes ever are made.

Begin by comparing your audience demographics with those of the social networks available to you and focus on developing a presence in the network which most closely matches your target audience. Developing a new community will take time, but it will help to future-proof your social media strategy and ensure that you reach as many people as possible.

Coping with Facebook’s changes

Of course, it’s impossible to simply walk away from Facebook, especially if you’ve already built a valuable presence there. So how can you best cope with the changes to EdgeRank? In a long and comprehensive blog post, American digital editor Steve Buttry provides a useful checklist of things to keep in mind when creating your posts. It is essential reading for everyone running a Facebook account, and here we can only summarise his main points:

1. Photo and video posts get more engagement and therefore more views.
2. Start conversations: Posts with a conversational tone will gain more engagement, and thus show up in more news feeds.
3. Include links that are not shortened so that users know where they are being sent.
4. Use keywords in your post, so use fewer acronyms, spell out the entire name of a sports team, etc.
5. Monitor your stats to determine the best time of day to post an update.
6. Encourage personal engagement with your stories by your journalists and sources.
7. Encourage sharing from your site.

You will undoubtedly have to experiment to see what works best for your audience. It’s important to remember to change just one variable at a time and measure the effect of that change to see what works and what doesn’t.

The bottom line is that all social networks are subject to constant upheaval and it is important not to cling too tightly to one way of doing things. Just make sure that you always keep audience engagement in mind.