Even with declining circulations, falling revenue and competition from other digital medium, Newspapers are not taking advantage of the social power of their readers, according to a study by Gartner.
Late last year, a total of 989 users in US, UK and Italy were surveyed. The results of the survey shouldn’t be a surprise to someone who regularly visits online publications of the newspapers.
Among the areas neglected by newspapers are search engine optimization and social media tools.
Search engine optimization, commonly referred to as SEO, makes it easier for search engines to find and rank content on a publisher’s website.
Social media tools allow a user to share a story on their favorite social network or social communications platform such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, digg etc.
With Twitter becoming more and more popular, many users including myself, use links posted by people I follow as a mechanism for filtering out news that worth reading. After all, if someone whom I follow on Twitter has taken the time to share a link, the chances are high that I might find it interesting.
Another important factor is lack of functionality provided by an internal search engine that a newspaper offers on their site. Often times, to save cost, websites go with the first available search engine that they can easily implement on their site without paying attention to the relevancy of the search results it generates.
Even when a search engine is available to search the newspaper site internally, it is not promoted as prominently as it should be. According to the Gartner study, only 20 percent of the respondents use search tools offered by a newspaper or a magazine site.
The survey also found that newspaper sites don’t facilitate sharing their news stories on Twitter even though many newspaper organizations have their staff on Twitter.
More than half of the respondents (52 percent) said when they find interesting content, they read it immediately compared to 9 percent who to bookmark it to read it later.
Almost a quarter of the respondents (24 percent) said they share the interesting/good content they find via personal communication tools such as IM or email whereas only 7 percent of the users “usually or often share content via embedding into social network sites.”
It is crucial for the newspaper publishers to integrate social media tools into their content management system “ecosphere” to equip users with the tools that can help them become effective brand stewards.
The full report, Newspaper Publishers Must Do More to Empower Brand Stewards, is available on Gartner website.
Tags: newspapers, publishers, social media, social networking, twitter
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