Newspapers and social media sites. What works?

Posted by Betsey Reinsborough on November 6, 2009 at 4:46 PM

Self-promotion is a tricky business. Over the past couple years, social networking has made it much easier (and cheaper) to get your name out there to the public. Most of the time anyway.

The use of social media for promotion had really began to pick up in the world of publishing, but to what extent? BBC just recently announced that they will be appointing a Social Media Editor in the near future. And a new article from the Newspaper Association of America explores the extent to which particular bookmarking and social networking sites increase page traffic for newspaper sites. It makes some interesting findings.

The Chicago Tribune's Associate Managing Editor for Innovation Bill Adee credits Digg with five percent of the newspaper's site's total traffic. That's half of all the pageviews generated from social media sites, which Adee credits with ten percent of total traffic on the site.

Conversely, the executive director, digital, at Star Tribune, Jason Erdahl, credits all social media sites with less than one-hundredth of a percent of all web traffic. Instead, Erdahl credits links from other blogs, such as the Huffington Post and the Drudge Report, as well as Yahoo! and Twitter with most of its outside web traffic.

The discrepancy seems almost inconceivable. How can one paper have such success while another receives almost no change in traffic? The presence of social networking buttons on the papers' website also seems to make large differences in increased traffic for some sites but none for others. According to the NAA's article, "the UK's Daily Telegraph Web site saw referrals from Digg rise from less than 600,000 in May to about 5.5 million in December after it added a Digg button and a Digg widget." However, social media buttons on Twincities.com performed so poorly that it removed the links because, according to vice-president Michael Fibbison, "nobody clicked on them and it was taking up load time."

The article comes to the conclusion that each individual newspaper needs to figure out the networking sites that work best for it. Depending on things such as location, circulation, subject-specific media, and relevance, different newspapers require different sites to increase their traffic. Stories about technology or quirky subjects more easily become internet memes and, thus, are more likely to make the rounds on a social media site. It's not about changing the content of the newspaper, but about finding the site that best caters to the content that is already typical of a certain paper. Larger papers tend to benefit more from Digg.com because they are on a more national level. By the same logic, sites like Facebook tend to benefit smaller, more localized papers because users have more friends concentrated around where they live, and thus, who are more likely to lead them to local news and happenings.

There is no end-all rule when using social media sites. Different papers have different needs and so will need to use different sites to get traffic. The bottom line is that these sites have heaps to offer in terms of promotion for newspapers, it is just up to the paper to use them to the fullest extent possible.

Source: Newspaper Association of America