Media companies have an inherent advantage over other brands on social - they’ve got TONS of content and it shows. On average, media companies post roughly 5x more often on Facebook and Twitter than brands across 50 other industries. They also receive much higher levels of engagement - up to 7x more interactions on Facebook. It’s important to note that you can’t achieve the best results on social if you measure in isolation. Media brands get an outsized proportion of social interactions, meaning the stakes are huge and the competition is fierce. Increasing site visits from social, competitive analysis, and benchmarking are crucial.

We’ve amassed an industry-leading social media dataset that is at your fingertips with Socialbakers Analytics. That data can help media brands track social performance against the competition and stay on top of how their content and overall social strategy are doing in the ever-changing social space. In this report, we look at how media companies should measure social performance, how media compares to other industries on social, and then get into a comparison of leading news and info outlets.

Social Media for Media

For every media brand - from global multimedia networks to small online publishers - using social media to create and maintain a loyal fanbase is key. If your goal is to drive traffic to your website through social, you need to publish the right content at the right time on the right platforms. The fact is that social engagement drives site visits.

Think

Reach > Engagement > Site visit > Conversion

Post Engagement is more important than ever because it is the metric that all other metrics rely on, correlate with, and drive. The more engaging a piece of content is, the more impressions it will gain. Reach increases, the potential for interactions increases, and new opportunities emerge.

We visualized how these core metrics are interrelated to illustrate the order in which they work together. Think of it this way - you have to start from the top of the funnel before you can expect any call to action to be fulfilled such as a click, app install, etc.

The fortunes of media sites can rise and fall in the Facebook News Feed. According to a study conducted by the Pew Research Center, “Roughly two-thirds (64%) of U.S. adults use [Facebook], and half of those users get news there — amounting to 30% of the general population.” This is an extraordinary development which definitely affects how people consume media content/news/journalism. Media companies need to take heed - their revenue streams increasingly depend on it.

US Media Performance on Facebook and Twitter

To understand how media companies can maximize their potential on social, we monitored the performance of 500+ US media companies and 3,600+ brands to see how they performed across Facebook and Twitter in 2014. As you can see in the Facebook chart - in January, media companies published an average of 7x more often than brands monthly and saw much higher interaction levels. By December, they posted a total average of 9x more than brands. Media companies should be aware that on Facebook, users are exposed to a vast array of news stories - nearly half of Facebook users see six different topic areas regularly. Facebook, however, still struggles to compete with Twitter on breaking news. In the Twitter chart, we can see that media companies send 800 Tweets per month, 8x more than brands on average, and they experienced double the interactions per 1,000 Followers.

Media companies are taking advantage of this, but all but a few could stand to do better. Here’s the breakdown of how they performed on the platform.

What Does it Mean for Media Brands?

Media companies blow brands out of the water in terms of engagement, and those interactions drive website traffic. Increasing traffic is critical for their existence - news outlets and media publishers alike can charge more for advertising and there is a higher probability of converting those potential consumers into subscribers. But to truly harness the power and make the most out of social media you need to understand your audience’s behavior and reading preferences in depth. With this knowledge, Media publishers can make their content more shareable and engaging, and win the battle for audiences’ attentions to beat out click-bait.

Now, when it comes to generating a lot of content with the main goal being driving site traffic - posting often and frequently does not guarantee a high volume of interactions. It’s all about producing high quality content that stimulates people to share and interact with it. To emphasize, frequency is good if you have the material and the team to do it, however less can be more.

The takeaway is this: social can be more for media companies than simply a click factory, but they need the competitive intelligence to hone and utilize its power. Watching the competition is key. If you see a particular topic gaining traffic, you can either chase the same thing, or go with something completely different geared towards a different audience segment.

Specifics: A Look at Leading Media Outlets

The homepage may not be as “dead” as predicted, but it has become merely a part of a larger ecosystem of content in most newsrooms. As social referrals count for more and more traffic, news outlets are starting to understand the need for social media analytics to be at the core of their products - every page is an entry point and chance for conversion. The social phenomenon has inspired new kinds of news sites. Now, prestigious legacy publishers like The New York Times and The Washington Post are competing with viral news outlets like BuzzFeed and Huffington Post whether they like it or not.

Sure, BuzzFeed and The Huffington Post dominate in terms of social traffic largely because of non news items, but we took a look at the most shared content on Facebook for 2014 and the NYT certainly plays the social click game. Their most-shared posts of the year tend to be lighter than truly “hard news” but also include stories about child development, the war in Afghanistan, and a picture of U.S. President Barack Obama hugging a woman who had been cured of Ebola. Some of the most-shared Facebook posts of the year included: A Huffington Post video piece dedicated to #PitBullWeek; a great NYT chart about how the English Premier League would perform if only goals scored by English players counted; and a Buzzfeed video about a baby bulldog learning how to howl.

BuzzFeed’s most-shared posts have upwards of 70 or 80,000 Shares, whereas the top NYT posts are all around 20,000 - a huge gap, especially taking into account the disparity in overall number of Fans. Traffic like that is allowing BuzzFeed to expand its news and investigative teams, in direct competition with more established outlets. As DigiDay reports, the NYT clearly sees how things are moving. “It isn’t chasing clicks; it’s making people loyal to the Times specifically,” Deputy Managing Editor for Outreach Alexandra MacCallum says. “The Times has had the luxury of readers coming direct for many many years. As readers move from search to social, we haven’t been as in front of them.”

What it Means

Notice that interactions are not keeping pace with fan growth for any of the legacy publishers, but BuzzFeed and The Huffington Post both really move, even if they went down a bit towards the end of the year. Obviously, having millions of fans is great, but if they are not interacting with your content, it’s really just a potential audience. The more socially-oriented outlets get this - the legacy publishers are still lagging. Interestingly, whereas brands tend to turn to paid promotions to boost Reach and interactions, the media companies we looked at really don’t promote much on Facebook. Using the Socialbakers Paid Post Detection (PPD) tool, we found that nearly 90% of interactions for the media outlets we measured were organic. Either media companies see no value in paid promotion, or they just are not allocating budget to boost content.

Go Deeper with Socialbakers

Social media can be - needs to be - more than a glorified RSS feed. Audiences expect it now. On average, media brands post more than 300 pieces of content on social a month. Among the sample of news organizations we looked at, that number sometimes reaches into the thousands. That’s a lot of content in a very competitive space. Media companies - especially those managing multiple social profiles with tens of millions of Fans and Followers - need to focus on key performance metrics like interactions, post clicks, and shareability. But, they also need to know how they stack up against the competition.

Media marketing teams need to be equipped with the right social media tools to publish at the right times, reach key audiences, and report the results effectively. Data is at the heart of executing an effective strategy - it’s imperative to have a comprehensive overview of what’s resonating with your audience across networks and paid media to take decisions in real-time. Socialbakers Analytics is helping thousands of clients - including some of the world’s top Media brands like the BBC, Discovery, and others - get more from social media with data-driven insights in competitive context. Only by analyzing, comparing, and benchmarking can marketing teams make more well-informed decisions where it matters most.

Space on social is finite, as is audience attention, and very few people read about the same issues multiple times on different platforms. Media firms need to pay attention to the competition’s social traffic and try to beat them the next time a big story breaks. They also need to benchmark over the long term and develop comprehensive social strategies that compete for social traffic, fans, and reach.