Facebook: A place to share articles on the weekend

Posted by Robert Eisenhart on March 9, 2010 at 12:49 PM

A recent survey of Facebook user habits by DanZarrella found that users are more likely to share articles with friends over the weekend than the week, even though less news is typically published during this time.

Zarrella attributes this trend to the fact that the majority of large companies block Facebook in the office. The only time that these users can access the site is typically after work and during weekends; this is definitely something that newspapers should take into account as they study the effects of social media on their online traffic. A recent study showed that Facebook sends a great deal of traffic to news outlets.

This information could also be useful to news organizations who are using Facebook profiles or fan pages to promote their articles. Each Facebook user's new feed displays updates from their friends, their pages and their groups. If news organizations want to increase the number of people who see their articles on Facebook, they should consider adopting a strategy that sends updates during the weekend, when users are most likely online.

As noted by Marshall Kirkpatrick of Read Write Web, the fact news organizations can use Facebook offer their fans updates about articles has enormous potential to redirect readers to news websites. This development represents a growing challenge to similar news feed applications offered by iGoogle and MyYahoo that have failed to gain mainstream usage.

Sources: DanZarrella