News Junkies & the Social Media Fix
[by Howard Fencl, APR]
In the world of TV news, the most rabid members of the viewing public have long been known as “news junkies.” In the pre-web, pre-social media era, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, they were the letter writers, the habitual phone callers; or in extreme (and scary) cases, they were the ones physically following news crews out covering stories just to be up close and personal.
Increasingly, the 21st century news junkie is using Twitter to get an info fix. I admitted to being one of them in an earlier post that looked at some surprising trends uncovered in a 2013 Pew Research Center project. A new study from Pew researchers reveals a significant increase in the number of Twitter and Facebook users depending on social media for news. While more social media users get news via Facebook according to the study, the numbers imply that hardcore newsies are gravitating toward Twitter:
- Twitter is the preferred platform for social media users following breaking news. Users prefer Twitter for breaking news over Facebook 59% – 31%.
- Watch a breaking news story unfold on Twitter with your TV tuned to any national cable news program, and you will quickly realize you are learning about many developments first on Twitter. As a veteran TV news exec, I had to laugh out loud during a recent news event when I saw someone tweet “TV news: it’s where you go to see what you found out on Twitter two hours ago.”
- About half of Twitter users follow news organizations. They follow Twitter primarily for politics, international affairs business and sports.
- The surge in Twitter news users since 2013 isn’t just Millennials or the post-Millennial iGeneration, it cuts a broad swath across generations, jumping from 55% to 67% for users under 35, and growing from 47% to 59% for users over 35.
- Finally, nearly half of all Twitter users single out specific news organization or specific reporters to follow.
The implications for your organization are clear: if you are making news, it will find its way to Twitter. In fact, that news may very well break on Twitter. If you are not proactive in communicating first about a crisis issue on Twitter, you may quickly find yourself trending behind a mocking, negative hashtag that casts you as a villain. In Q2 of 2015, 65 million Americans used Twitter monthly, according to research portal Statista. That’s a potential avalanche of negativity that can devastate a company’s reputation in short order.
Here’s another sobering fact: Those Twitter users are almost certainly learning about your news on a mobile device – most likely, their smartphone. According to a study from April 2014, 85 percent of time spent on Twitter was spent on a mobile device. That study is more than a year old. Anyone want to bet mobile device use has gone up since then?
That means people are learning about your crisis on the run, in bits and pieces, on their smartphones.
And that means you have to be ready. You can’t react to a crisis. You have to be prepared. Your crisis plan should not only include statements for the media, but should have social media posts ready to go, including 140-character tweets.
The new Pew study should serve as a wake-up call for Twitter-averse Luddites still roaming the corporate landscape. Social media must play a prominent role in your crisis planning. And Twitter, specifically, must be a focus for your organization’s news outreach, good and bad.
It bears repeating: You don’t have to fear Twitter, you don’t have to love Twitter, but you have to understand it – and how to use it to your advantage. You can continue to ignore Twitter, but you do so at your own risk.