Blog and News Feeds Spur Social Media Discussion
By Anna Johnson on November 22nd, 2009According to PostRank, the level of social media conversations and discussions regarding the 1,000 ‘most engaging’ blog and news feeds has grown 30 percent year over year since 2007.
According to PostRank, not only are more people participating in social media, but the “‘share, and like this’ phenomenon sweeping through Facebook, Twitter, and dozens of other social hubs, are all facilitating this trend”.
One interesting consequence of this growth in social media engagement is that as more discussions occur on Facebook, Twitter and the like, fewer discussions are occurring on the blog sites themselves.
According to PostRank, between 2007 and 2009 the amount of on-site engagement has dropped by over 50 percent, while the off-site engagement has grown.
How are blog and news feeds spurring social media discussions? PostRank says that trackbacks, which were previously the main driver of such discussions have declined from 19 percent to 3 percent between 2007 to 2009. At the same time, discussions about feeds on social media channels such as Twitter, Friendfeed, and Facebook have risen from than 1 percent to over 29 percent.
PostRank also notes that a typical story now has a longer lifespan. In 2007, over 94 percent of engagement with a news story occurred within the first day of publication, with 98 percent of that within the first hour of publication. By 2008, however, 83 percent of total engagement occurred in the first hour and in 2009, it was 64 percent.
PostRank calls this phenomenon ‘strengthening the weak ties’ and reassures publishers that the trend towards more off-site engagement is nothing to fear:
“Anyone who worries about the monoculture effect of niche networks should breathe a sigh of relief — the data indicates the complete opposite. Even as we organize ourselves into micro-networks of interests, the weak ties that everyone brings are helping the content to travel further and over longer periods of time. Increased lifespan of a story from 2007 to 2009 is case in point.”
Publishers will, however, need to work out better ways to harness social media. After all, the vast majority of discussion about a given article still occurs in the first hour of its publication.
At this stage, most publishers seem to opt for a combined ‘machine gun and grenade’ approach: constantly firing out stories in the hopes of a hit, whilst also throwing out some grenades as the ‘big stories’ they hope will have the greatest resonance and longevity.
Whether or not this changes – or needs to change – in light of the trends noted by PostRank remains to be seen…
Source: Ilya Grigorik, “Measuring Engagement of the Social Web: ‘07-’09,” PostRank, November 16, 2009
