Newsroom With A View

The latest study result from the Pew Internet and American Life Project confirm the conventional wisdom that more and more people are joining social networking sites (SNS):

“Nearly half of adults (47%), or 59% of internet users, say they use at least one of SNS. This is close to double the 26% of adults (34% of internet users) who used a SNS in 2008. Among other things, this means the average age of adult-SNS users has shifted from 33 in 2008 to 38 in 2010. Over half of all adult SNS users are now over the age of 35. Some 56% of SNS users now are female.”

And note that when people say they are using social networks, they pretty much mean Facebook:

“Facebook dominates the SNS space in this survey: 92% of SNS users are on Facebook; 29% use MySpace, 18% used LinkedIn and 13% use Twitter.”

As long as the trend continues, and as long as your site’s own statistics reflect the growing influence of social media on your traffic, the time a news staff spends in this area is easier and easier to justify as a core function.

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Another day, another study confirming what previous studies have shown about Facebook. Quick summary: “sharing now produces an estimated 10 percent of all Internet traffic and 31 percent of referral traffic to sites from search and social. Search is still about twice as big.

“When it comes to sharing on the Web, Facebook rules. Facebook accounts for 38 percent of all sharing referral traffic. Email and Twitter tied for second with 17 percent each. Those are the percentages that actually clicked through. The raw sharing numbers are higher. Facebook makes up 56 percent of all shared content (up from 45 percent in August, 2010), followed by email at 15 percent (down from 34 percent) …”

I note especially that figure showing halving of the sharing done via e-mail. It would seem that most of that moved to Facebook. Thinking about it, that certainly mirrors shifts in my own sending and receiving of e-mail: Except for my mother-in-law, most people seem to do less e-mailing of links than they used to. As noted here in previous posts about sharing links to your stories via Facebook, this is a snapshot and a trend, it doesn’t mean it will be permanent, but it does reinforce how people right now feel most comfortable sharing information they find interesting.

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CNN.com’s headline says these are 10 fascinating Facebook facts, but only one truly qualifies as fascinating to me: Among people under 35, 36 percent admit to “tweeting, texting and checking Facebook after sex.” An excuse not to cuddle? Or talk?

But as a group, the 10 facts provide an interesting snapshot of some of the ways people, especially the young-adult demographic, use Facebook, currently the key social-media tool for newsrooms.

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