Our group project is based around the
research of how twitter can be used in relation to news stories. Using the skills learnt from the recent
library session I’ve found an article related to our research project. The
article is named ‘Online news on Twitter:
Newspapers’ social media adoption and their online readership’ and is wrote by Sounman
Hong for
the economics of digital media markets journal published by the Harvard
university.
The article is based on a study which aims to ‘understand the
implications of news organizations’ adoption of social media sites through (1)
an examination of the relationship between news organizations’ adoption of
social media and their online readership and (2) a comparison of online traffic
generated by social media sites with that generated by other online media
institutions.’ (Hong
2012: 69) This article is useful to us to use as evidence as it highlights the
relationship between newspapers and twitter users and can be used to support
our theory that twitter is frequently used to find out the lasts news stories.
‘37%
of internet users disseminate news content via posting on social media sites
such as Facebook and Twitter.’ (Hong
2012: 69) This statistic was researched by Pew Research (2010), the evidence found
by them implies that people who read newspapers on their mobile phones tend to
be more active users of social media sites and read or share news stories more frequently
using those sites. This is important for our research as we can use this as the
base of our research. The Hong article leads us to Pew Research (2010) and in
order for us to expand our evidence the next step would be to analyse the study
conducted by Pew Research (2010).
Another positive
aspect of the article can be the use of links it gives. Just like the Pew
Research evidence Hong (2012) gives reference to Emmett (2009) who claims The New York Times
describes its social media marketing as “one of the several essential
strategies for disseminating news online” (Emmett, 2009). This is
useful as again it can be used as evidence to support our view that twitter
users find out news stories more frequently, but it also helps us to expand our
research into looking at the project from the newspapers aspect rather than the
aspect of social networking sites. If we were to also research in this area
then again the Hong (2012) article is useful in directing us to other work that
shares the same research area as our group project.
From this table we can see that there are a high percentage of
newspapers who have adopted social media; twitter having the higher percentage
of 87.4% over Facebook of which has 82.6%. The table also shows a high level of
interaction with the newspapers having 22,070 followers and an average of 116
tweets per week. From this we can interpret it to see how there is a high level
of engagement with twitter followers and the amount of information they are
receiving each week.
These are the useful points of the article of which we will be able to
use for our group project. A limitation of the article is that some pieces of
evidence won’t be of use to us for our group project. The information is useful
yet irrelevant to our research. The article looks at the traffic of newspapers
on social media sites. Our research is just interested in the frequent use of
newspapers on Twitter. They refer to trafficking on
the basis of the sites that people visited prior to visiting the newspaper
websites. They then categorised these into sub headings ‘direct traffic, search traffic, aggregators’ traffic, social media traffic,
and others.’ Direct traffic refers to online traffic that is not
referred by any other websites. For example, if you directly visit the New York Times website by typing www.nytimes.com into the web address
bar, then this type of traffic will be classified under direct traffic. Search traffic, aggregators’ traffic, and social network traffic
refer to online traffic that is referred by search engines, news aggregators,
and social media websites, respectively. Social media sites with the largest
share of traffic include Facebook and Twitter. This is all interesting
research but far too complicated in relation to what we are looking for. In order
for them to research the methodology used was impressive. They used variables
and worked out formulas of what to find etc
(1)
UVit=α0+β1adoptit+f(t)+αi+ϵijt
(2)
‘Although useful, this is a descriptive rather than analytical empirical analysis; therefore, it does not illustrate a clear association between social media adoption and online traffic.’ (Hong 2012: 73) for our project we plan to be statistical and work empirically to find trends between newspapers and twitter followers.
I believe
this article is a useful starting position for us to use in our group project. It
had directed us with many links of researchers whose work will hopefully be of
benefit to our research too.
References;Information Economics and Policy
Volume 24, Issue 1, March 2012, Pages 69–74
The Economics of Digital Media Markets
Volume 24, Issue 1, March 2012, Pages 69–74
The Economics of Digital Media Markets
Online news on
Twitter: Newspapers’ social media adoption and their online readership
·
Harvard
University, John F. Kennedy School of Government, 79 John F. Kennedy Street,
Cambridge, MA 02138, United States
It looks like you found a useful article here for your research. At times, you could be a little more specific about its usefulness/weaknesses but generally a good exposition here. 3
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