Online news on Twitter: Newspapers’ social media adoption and their online readership

Today, the Internet is a major source from which people obtain new information. According to a recent survey conducted by Pew Research (2010), the Internet has surpassed newspapers in terms of popularity as a news platform and ranks just behind television. The Pew Internet survey also summarizes that “peoples’ relationship to news is becoming portable and participatory.” The survey found that 33% of mobile phone owners read newspapers on their mobile phones, and 37% of Internet users disseminate news content via postings on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. In response to the changing business environment and the rapidly growing number of people using mobile technologies to read news online (Pew Internet, 2010), news organizations will have to increase their use of social media to attract attention online.¹ As can be seen in Table 2, many media organizations have adopted social media to route traffic to their websites (Messner et al., 2011). For instance, The New York Times describes its social media marketing as “one of the several essential strategies for disseminating news online” (Emmett, 2009).

Despite the newspaper industry’s rapidly growing use of social media, thus far, very few studies have discussed the impact of social media in the context of the online news industry. Only a small number of studies have been conducted research on social media, and from among these, Chi and Yang (2010) present findings pertaining to US politicians’ adoption of Twitter at the 111th House of Representatives. They found that the successes of politicians who had already adopted Twitter tended to accelerate Twitter adoption by other politicians. “Success,” on Twitter, is defined as having a high number of followers per post. In other words, Chi and Yang’s study works on the assumption that politicians’ adoption of Twitter and the subsequent increase in their networks vis-à-vis social media are good proxies for the “success” of using Twitter; however, this assumption has yet to be tested.

In this context, an important question is whether, and to what extent, the adoption of social media tools is associated with measurable benefits for the adopters, for instance, the number of online audiences in the online news industry. To the best of my knowledge, previous studies have not examined this seemingly obvious yet important question. Furthermore, previous studies have not shown whether social media sites can have different impacts on the distribution of online traffic, compared to the online traffic generated by other online media institutions such as search engines or news aggregators. There are at least two reasons why the online traffic generated by social media sites differs from that generated by search engines or news aggregators.² (1) Social media sites generally do not rank online news stories. However, search engines or news aggregators create information cascades³ because they rank information depending on certain measures of “popularity” (Duan et al., 2009); highly ranked information is made more visible to users, assuring an even higher probability of getting online clicks.⁴ (2) Social media sites provide a platform for organizations to reach out to their audiences. For example, before the advent of social media tools, news organizations would post their news stories on their websites and depend on search engines or aggregators to direct traffic to them. Now, though, news organizations make use of social media tools to actively disseminate news themselves: these tools ensure that news reaches all the networks⁵ that expressed an interest in the news, regardless of whether search engines or aggregators are interested in that news. The above two differences suggest that the online traffic generated by social media sites is more egalitarian than that generated by other media institutions.

In this paper, I use the case of the online news industry to present evidence on the associations between the adoption of social media sites and the online readership. The online news industry is of particular interest to this study because online traffic is used as a proxy for the benefits that newspapers obtain through the use of social media; further, online traffic is an important source of revenues for news organizations. To the best of my knowledge, this paper comprises the first empirical evidence on the association between social media adoption and online traffic in the context of the online news industry.