Posts and Pictures, Lists and Gifs
How Social Media has Shaped Digital News
The rise and increasing influence of social media has created a tricky quandary for digital publications; how do you cater for people who are visually wired, with patience at a premium and an aversion to information overload?
When the first wave of media publications started to establish an online presence there were clear warning signs that a simple ‘copy and paste’ strategy wouldn’t work. Media consumers weren’t migrating online because they found the Telegraph’s broadsheet pages too tough to handle, nor were the inky fingers or recycling headaches motives behind a ‘digital shift’. Online consumers of media had a thirst for a new type of publication, and thus a period of adjustment began.
Social media has shaped the way we interact with the online world. It gives us a role to play which is why we talk of a digital ‘world’ in which people are participants rather than just observers, cogs in the system and so forth. In that way it is by their rules that we comply; 140 character limit on Twitter, the list-like nature of a Facebook timeline and the multimedia-led structures of Instagram, Pinterest and Snapchat. Observe the elements of social media and you will begin to understand the underlying composition of digital media.
The use of visualized information has increased by 400 per cent in online literature since 1990, by 9,900 per cent on the internet since 2007 and by 142 per cent in newspapers. In short that’s because we suffer from information overload in the digital age and thus crave information that can digested quickly, like social media, and media outlets have both been born from this trend and responded to it.
BuzzFeed, for example, dubs itself as a “social news and entertainment company” that “provides shareable breaking news, original reporting, entertainment, and video across the social web” to a global audience of more than 200 million people.The site has become a world-wide phenomenon as a media outlet based on social media concepts and isn’t alone in capitalising on social-led media. And mainstream titles have started to catch up.
Lists, pictures, infographics, videos and Gifs have become a pre-requisite of most posts on sites such as the Mail Online, which is now the world’s biggest newspaper website.
One of our recent surveys commissioned on behalf of Interparcel found Brits are becoming increasingly impatient in general, with the average respondent waiting only ten seconds for a web page or link to load and only 16 seconds for a video to buffer. But as interesting as the results were, the real clever bit is what we did with them when it came to selling the story into the media. Not only did we provide solid news copy that was picked up by The Mail, The Telegraph and Metro but we added infographics, video and list material into the mix that meant it was picked up by countless online sites including The Star, MTV, BT.com, AOL and, of course, Mail Online.
The concluding remark is that if social media is shaping digital news then it must in turn shape how we do PR. At 72Point we have a growing digital team that is keeping ahead of the curve in that regard with exciting new infrastructure and a wealth of expertise, creating social campaigns for a social generation.
