Nieman Foundation at Harvard
HOME
          
LATEST STORY
Four disabled journalists on how news outlets can support staffers and audience members with disabilities
ABOUT                    SUBSCRIBE
Feb. 5, 2015, 12:08 p.m.
LINK: hacktext.com  ➚   |   Posted by: Caroline O'Donovan   |   February 5, 2015

Aram Zucker-Scharff, a content strategist with CFO Publishing, has a new piece about the results of a casual independent experiment he conducted on Facebook’s News Feed. His experiment — which he himself calls “not-so-scientific” — only lasted two weeks, and, as he notes, the analytics data he’s working with is less than perfectly accurate. But it might still be worthwhile to take a look at a few of his findings, particularly for people running Facebook pages for news organizations.

For example, he finds that getting users to click on links is much more important than getting users to like or comment when it comes to getting a post promoted:

With a significant amount of consistency, the count of people who clicked on articles was the most important measure for determining the continuing popularity of a post. Almost every post was clicked the day it was posted and the day after. If the number of clicks exceeded 25% of the previous day, it usually got clicks the day after. If they didn’t, it didn’t get any clicks the following day.

I had some pretty active comment threads over this period, with variety when it came to the number of different participants. As far as I can tell, the number of comments or commenters didn’t significantly matter when it came to a post’s popularity.

Zucker-Scharff also tried to find a correlation between the time a link was posted and how much traffic the story received from Facebook:

I saw absolutely no correlation between the popularity of an article and when I shared it.

Zucker-Scharff also found that the majority of reading and click on Facebook is done on mobile devices, which means publishers need to be thinking about how their stories look on mobile devices:

60% of clicks were from mobile users. 87% of those users were on Apple or Samsung devices.

Show tags
 
Join the 60,000 who get the freshest future-of-journalism news in our daily email.
Four disabled journalists on how news outlets can support staffers and audience members with disabilities
“The tools that journalists are given [should be] accessible — and designed with people like me in an advisory role.”
Press freedom means controlling the language of AI
Generative AI systems act like “stochastic parrots,” using statistical models to guess word orders and pixel placements. That’s incompatible with a free press that commands its own words.
What is news, anyway? Readers’ answers depend on how much they see people like themselves in the story
“The disconnect many young people feel may come from a lack of representation, which we show violates a fundamental aspect of how audiences — teens and adults — define what is news.”