Media’s Thinking About Social Media Should Change

On November 8, 2018, Fox News, which had 18.4 million followers at the time, stopped tweeting. Months went by and the account was silent. It stopped its boycott at some point and returned to tweeting constantly as most media companies do. But for a period, it was silent.

You might think, “Well, that was been pretty dumb of them. How much traffic did they miss out on because of it?” You might be surprised to know it had very little impact on the business. According to The Wrap:

According to Comscore data compiled by TheRighting, traffic on FoxNews.com has actually grown since the Twitter ban went into effect, climbing from 88.9 million unique visitors in November 2018 to nearly 95.2 million in September, the last month for which full data is available. Multiplatform views also reached 1.7 million, a 25% jump from September 2018.

‘Twitter was never a source of referral traffic for us,” an individual with knowledge of Fox News’ digital division told TheWrap this week. “The revenue from Twitter was never significant enough,” the individual added, noting that YouTube “brings in significantly more revenue for us than Twitter.” A rep for Fox News had no comment on whether the network would alter its current Twitter policy.

Obviously, with 18.4 million people, it was getting some traffic, but as a percentage, it was likely small. As I thought about this, I also thought about various other analytics accounts I’d looked at over the years. And, by and large, Twitter had driven very little traffic.

This obviously runs counter to other social media platforms. Facebook used to be an incredible source of traffic for publishers. Until, of course, it wasn’t. If you want a trip down memory lane, in my very first AMO piece, I shared this graph showing referrals to Slate from January 2017 to May 2018.

According to Parse.ly’s Referrer Dashboard, social media accounts for approximately 13% of the traffic to publisher websites. If we look beyond the fact that these are walled gardens built to keep people from leaving, I have a couple of other ideas why these giant sites drive such small amounts of traffic.

The easy answer is that these accounts are incredibly large, but are likely followed by a ton of inactive accounts. Once you follow, you remain a follower irrespective of if you engage with the content or even log in to the site. The New York Times has 51.5 million followers on Twitter and when looking at 100 tweets posted on the account, only two had over 1,000 likes—both were about wolves.

That’s the easy answer. NYT may have a ton of followers, but it doesn’t have a ton of active followers. But that answer sort of absolves responsibility for the publisher. “We can’t churn our social lists like we do our email lists, so it’s fine.”

But is it?

I think the harder and more likely answer is that publishers don’t view social as a means of being social, but instead, simply view it as this detached, arms-length way of promoting content. It’s a blind exercise in distributing as many posts a day with the hopes that, in aggregate, publishers will get enough traffic to their sites to be worthwhile.

I think this is the wrong way to think about it. If publishers are already seeing a low percentage of traffic coming from these sources, perhaps publishers should try something different.

My recommendation starts with a simple question: if we didn’t have a media company, content, or journalism that we were trying to promote, but instead wanted to grow a following of a specific category, what things would we do?

That, I believe, is the critical question we should be asking ourselves. Because if we tackle it from the perspective of trying to build a specific type of follower, we’ll start asking additional questions like:

• What does that type of person want?
• What information do they need?
• What do they enjoy?
• What other people/brands target that person?

The strategies that we develop would suddenly focus on providing value on the actual platform. Once you do that, people will start engaging. So, instead of spending all day posting every story you’ve published, maybe you do a Twitter thread on some of them. You’ve done the reporting already, so it’s a repurposing of said stories. Or, you ask people questions in a scheduled Twitter chat.

A more blasphemous comment might be that you share other publishers’ content. The reason we don’t do this today is that we want all the traffic for ourselves. But what if that other content is great and answers the question of “what information do they need?” Why shouldn’t we share it?

The benefit of this type of social strategy is that, by design, it has engagement built into it. Users are encouraged to participate in the Twitter chat. The thread is built for readers to see multiple tweets rather than just clicking a link over to a story. Theoretically, this means that people will be following the account because they want the content.

But what’s the point of all of this if you’re not getting any traffic?

I often say that building on rented land is dangerous. And building social followings is absolutely building on rented land. The platforms can change their algorithms and you’re suddenly out of luck. So, the answer to the above question is this: there may not actually be a point.

The reality is, most bulk sharing of stories is probably not worth the effort. The days of social platforms being huge drivers of traffic are probably long gone. Slate, alone, went from 28.33 million visits to 3.63 million from Facebook in 16 months. Talk about a complete gutting of anticipated traffic.

However, there are other ways to benefit from the social audience. Can it be used to create FOMO for an event you’re hosting? Can you hold contests for other people to share your newsletter referral program, getting your engaged audience excited to participate? Are there direct monetization opportunities?

Monetizing social is complicated and we’ve all witnessed the horror stories of the “pivot to video,” which was really just a social video strategy chasing preroll ads. But I do think that if you have an engaged following on these platforms, there may be small opportunities to generate revenue. It shouldn’t be the core focus, but as add ons to the owned & operated monetized products, it could be interesting.

I honestly think, most publishers shouldn’t spend much time thinking about social media. It doesn’t warrant a full team because those people are just sharing posts that get almost no interaction. A better use of resources would be to hire more journalists or creators, considering nearly 60% of traffic (according to Parsely) comes from search or directly to the site (which doesn’t require active sharing of content).

But for publishers that do want to actually build an engagement tool, there might be value in developing a social strategy. But its primary purpose may never be to drive a ton of eyeballs to stories. As a secondary driver, it might make sense. But until you have a following that actually cares about you, there’s likely little benefit from a traffic perspective. And building a social relationship takes time.

Thanks for reading today’s newsletter. If you have thoughts, please hit reply or join the AMO Slack channel and let me know. Have a great weekend!