Social media winners: Small websites!

Bigger news companies invested money in order to be effective in social media. Every major newspaper, blog and TV news channel have own Twitter and Facebook team. The New York Times proudly gives twitter addresses of its reporters and editors in its national section. CNN, MSNBC and Fox News have special feed for the breaking news. Day by day, more journalists open new Twitter and Facebook accounts and try to reach wider audience. But statistics shows that using social media doesn't get every time good feedback and increasing audiences.

According to the data from The ninth edition of Pew Research’s State of the News Media 2012 report,  “News sites now get 9% of their traffic from social media, up about 57% in two years. “ But real beneficiary of the social media is not the major news sources. Yes, the winner is small ones.

Last September a study on news websites working within Chicago was published. Study was conducted Northwestern professor Rich Gordon and paid for by The Chicago Community Trust. Prof. Gordon and his team examined all the links between 301 news websites for two-week period and obtained analytics data about referral sources for about 100 of those sites. The study showed that the social media traffic is particularly important for smaller sites.  It is pointed out that small size of sites gets 48.1% visits from Facebook, medium size of them attracts 25.6% visits and large ones get in 14.5% visits.

The other interesting information about social media sites is regarding advertising and other type of revenues. Pew Research warned that, “ Social media – particularly Facebook, with its huge audience and domineering lead – have become a partner no news organization can afford to ignore.”

Dependency to the social media is increasing and citizen journalism became primary source of online journalism. I can give an example about my own experience. When super storm has been happening, I was looking at the Instagram photos. I currently live in London, and only sources from New York and Eastern part of the USA were news agencies and twitter feeds. But I’m considering myself as a social media addict and figured out a new way of editing. I have entered #Newyork and #Sandy hashtags on my Instagram account and found various photos from flooded areas. I wasted my whole night to find these pictures and retweet them from USASABAH’s official Twitter account. I was very good at this job because I could obtain and republish very good photos even before Time and the other major news sources. USASABAH is rather small news website, and we have gained more than five hundred followers in a night. And the number of followers topped over two thousand. (Due to disagreement between Twitter and Instagram, It can’t be reach those photos on Twitter anymore. )

I’m wondering, whether Twitter will have some problems with the major news sources such as Wall Street Journal and the MSNBC about their services on this site. Especially when you think about Guy Adams’ Twitter suspension and recent censorship policy, there might be some problem in the future at least between Twitter and local journalists.