Getting your News from Social Media: More Mindshare than Market Share?

There’s this illusion that one day, we’ll get all our news from social media. I don’t believe so.

Don’t get me wrong about believing in the importance and vibrancy of social media. It’s here to stay, of course. But today, social media has more mindshare than market share, at least from a news content perspective. LinkedIn Today is a perfect example where you will get very incomplete views of news on particular subjects because of its sole reliance on social news.

The explosion of content has blown content to bits, leaving it up to us to literally pick-up the pieces and re-assemble them. Entered Social Media who offered easy ways to surface these pieces without much effort, e.g. via Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn and to social news aggregators who made it easy to pick-up these pieces. But what’s easy is masking the bottom of the iceberg where there’s equally if not more valuable content. By spending lots of time reading social news, we think we’re getting everything, but we’re not. What’s relevant to you is not the same as what’s popular amongst your friends or social networks.

As a Curated Content Management platform, we have one foot in social media, and the other in online media.  Our vertical properties perform a parallel duty of monitoring the Twitter stream as well as mining thousands of curated online sources. Therefore, we’re able to compare results from both sides of the media. We have found there are 4 scenarios for social media’s contribution as it pertains to being a bearer of news. Here they are:

Social Media as a Mirror
When the news is mainstream, social news will be a replica of popular online news. Example: our Company portal that monitors Research in Motion showed that the Twitter widget returning very similar content as the one from the web when they announced their earnings, Actually, online media was markedly more comprehensive.

Social Media as Long Tail
When the topic is not easy to properly define, social media monitoring allows you to discover additional content nuggets that would be difficult to find otherwise. This applies to topics such as Digital Curation, Social Media Intelligence or Content Marketing where our online filters are finding most of the content, but the Twitter stream is helpful in discovering new sources or related content at the edge of a particular topic.

Social Media as Breaking News
That’s a natural for Twitter and social media. Specifically, spectacular events (good or bad ones) will propagate “raw” on social media before any “media processing”. There’s no denying that Twitter is the optimal platform for breaking news.

Social Media as a Slice
In this scenario, social media will give you very incomplete content because the content is not being discussed or shared as comprehensively or willingly. This applies to a lot of professional topics where either the content isn’t there, or where you need sophisticated filters that go beyond the cryptic 140 characters. Examples including our Outsourcing or Supply Chain Management portals.

Paradoxically, you may think: if the news hasn’t bubbled into the social sphere, then it’s not worth reading. Yes, and No. That statement assumes that all the news is on social media to start with, and that enough people are giving it the necessary social gestures to allow it to rise to the top. That may be true for generic topics, but not true at all for the specialized needs of B2B professionals, niche hobbies and emerging or specialized topics.

By being busy and having plenty to read from social media, we think we’re being thorough, whereas we’re just being busy. You need to balance social news reading with targeted online news reading via keyword filters that mine more than the social mediasphere which is the tip of the iceberg for media.

Related articles

• Why news sites should consider adding the LinkedIn share button (blogs.journalism.co.uk)
• Everyone Should Hire ‘Social Media Experts’ (seomoz.org)