Recently I was watching the world’s most depressing saga; “the news,” here in Arizona. I suddenly was shocked out of my private lamentations about the world when I heard them say, “Hey, why don’t you follow us on Twitter and Facebook?” This amazed me! I thought, what a great strategy and applicable usage of social media for a big brand and what a holistic approach for its usage.
Social media gives news corporations an opportunity to reach a new market as well as continue to interact with their loyal consumer base. In addition to the typical social media and internet user, Baby Boomers have joined the party. They have recently become a driving force in online shopping and there are rapidly growing numbers of Baby Boomers and Generation Jones individuals who are flocking to Myspace, Facebook and Twitter. According to a recent ComScore survey “16.5 million adults ages 55 and older engage in social networking”. In just one year since AARP.org unveiled its social networking platform, about 350,000 users have created 1,700 groups celebrating everything from gardening to social activism. These TV syndication partners hit a gold mine with social media usage. Below are a few bullet points that speak directly to these points.
- Increases brand interaction. By utilizing Facebook and Twitter (where these news channels demographics participate online) they have created 2 additional outlets for the public to interact directly with their news provider.
Created additional channels for public discussion. One of the nine principles of journalism states “The news media are the common carriers of public discussion, and this responsibility forms a basis for our special privileges.” What better way to accomplish this goal than by including what real people say and feel about each story reported rather than just one reporter! - Direct Marketing Opportunities. Imagine you have a subscription to a magazine. Now that you are a member you will receive magazines but they will include advertisements in them. That is how these magazines make the biggest portion of their revenue. In the same way, you inadvertently become a new marketing channel for display ads, email alerts, re-tweets, tweets and more. This allows for even more visibility for their news channel.
- Harvested and refined offline and online demographics. They successfully harvested and mined a portion of offline watchers by pulling them online and then grouping them together. Of course by using Facebook opposed to Twitter, the marketers deploying this strategy can now tell more about their viewing public then ever before. Here are some stats:
- Percentage of male vs female viewers
- Married vs non married
- Households with children or no children
- Profession
- Income
- Education background
- Religious preferences
- And more!
I’m sure many of you have ideas and suggestions on how they can improve these campaigns, or other comments and discussion points. Let us know what you think about this application of social media. Looking forward to the conversation!
Thoughts?
Sources: http://www.usatoday.com/tech/webguide/internetlife/2009-03-26-boomer-social-networking_N.htm
http://social-media-optimization.com/images/boomers2.gif
{ 14 comments… read them below or add one }
Social Media has many benfits, nice job of calling them out here.
This was a great article regarding the baby boomers updating! Twitter is defiantly one of the most busiest sites i have ever been on being put to a page that states Too much traffic check back in a couple minutes. That is awesome! I feel that the using the social media outlets available now is a great way to get out there more.
You’re absolutely right. Social media is critical to any growing business, online or off.
We’re using it extensively on our Panama real estate website and the rest of the Panama network.
Keep up the great work Joe!
It is cool to see the unique opportunities that local papers have in social media compared with the broader national/international news sites.
It’s truly amazing how we’ve become such a Twitter and Facebook and Myspace and Tagged and all of these different sorts of social networking sites, world..Miraculous!
There are definetely some cool marketing functions for social media, and there is no doubt that its effective, but sometimes its obnoxious how much they’ve saturated the social media marketplace… not to say that I wouldn’t do the same to make more money
Local news channel 10 in PHX promotes this non stop. I believe the news station actually pushes their reporters/anchors to promote their own twitter and facebook accounts as well as the stations.
@jon
Thats a great observation! Why do you think that is? Possibly for poeple to get news stories to reporters easier?
Oh man here is something cool… ha.. That would be a great tool for internet marketers doing PR. What a great way to get out and connect with the reporter directly.
Makes the consumer feel connected and more involved if they have the ability to see personal info from these people, whether it is or not.
Some news channels get it, lots don’t and that’s frustrating.
When USAToday.com went more social back in ’07 to create community, the site saw a staggering 380% increase in new user registrations, in addition to a 21% increase in unique visitors, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.
This is more important than ever, considering traditional newspapers are going the way of the dodo bird…..
Are there any best practices created for news organizations seeking distribution through social media?
My concern (were I working for a news org) would be connecting users with only the information they want to read and not overloading them with stories that don’t interest them.
However, as a reader I would be interested to see “most tweeted” stories as well as “most discussed” especially for local news.
That said, I would personally never subscribe to a news twitter feed because I don’t think it would be very well tailored to my interests. If it were a reporter whose stories I liked, well, THAT’s another story
Good food for thought Joe.
G
Yeah I agree I have been seeing more and more mainstream people and organizations talking about following them on face book and twitter. Good tools for them to use.
@ Garrett
That is a really great point you make Garrett. As of right now it is a internet marketers dream because we don’t currently have to worry about filtered results based on user discretion. I think what you are saying makes sense and I can see twitter down the line providing filters on tweets – potentially. I know the more followers I get the more noise I get on my dashboard vs signal. It would be a useful tool.
@twitter
Do you hear this!!! We are giving you ideas for great new features… HELLOOO!!!
@ Garrett
Great point. I just stopped following a local newspaper because it was Twitting headlines every 3 seconds that I didn’t particularly care about. If I wanted to read ALL their headlines, I would subscribe to the traditional print. Would love to be able to filter based on specific areas of interest.