Commentary

Digital-Only Pubs Dominate Twitter

Digital-only publications account for a larger share of social media activity on Twitter compared to combination print and digital publications, according to a new study of publications’ performance across social media platforms conducted by Engagement Labs. The study is based on Engagement Labs’ “eValue” scoring tool, which considers social activity measures including the level of engagement generated by content on different networks, the reach within each network, and the publications’ responsiveness to conversations among users.

Twitter was a lock for online-only publications in the Engagement Labs survey, with BuzzFeed in the top spot, followed by The Blaze, The Verge, The Huffington Post, and CNET.  Interestingly, combination print and digital publications did much better on Facebook, led by the Houston Chronicle and the New York Daily News in the top two spots. Business Insider, a digital-only publication, was in third place, followed by The Guardian in fourth place and USA Today in fifth.

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Engagement Labs attributed the difference between pubs’ performance on these platforms in part to the length of the content distributed, with Facebook providing a better channel for long-form articles from print publications, which tend to remain in the trending news and near the top of users’ newsfeed longer (it’s worth noting the one only-only publication in the Facebook ranking, Business Insider, produces a good amount of longer form content). Meanwhile Twitter lends itself to shorter content with frequent updates in real time, of the sort published by the online-only publications.

That said, Facebook led Twitter in terms of average engagement across both digital-only and combination print and online publications. Engagement Labs noted that this is probably due to news items getting lost in the clutter of frequently-updated Twitter feeds.

Facebook and Twitter (as well as relative newcomers like Snapchat, and tech companies like Apple) are all wooing publishers with the promise of access to huge audiences and new features, in return for the content they need to build user engagement. Last week Facebook announced that it is rolling out a new targeting tool to help publishers better reach and understand their in-network audiences. The new Audience Optimization tool is supposed to improve the relevancy of publishers’ posts by pointing out those readers most likely to engage with them.

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