Loading ...It’s getting tougher and tougher to be a Google fan these days. It appears that Facebook has just become a more trusted source for news than Google News. According to a report by Hitwise, 78% of loyal Facebook users revisited the site for more news
compared to only 67% that hit up Google for the same.
The data that was collected earlier this month allowed Hitwise to analyze the unique viewers to the sites and where they were directed from. Then it figured out how many users visited many times from the same source. I guess Facebook won, this time. I would tend to say that it’s more because Facebook is new and used almost every single day for more than one reason with most of it’s user base, but that’s just me.
Social media sites have already helped many large sites like eBay, the Huffington Post, Meebo, MSNBC and the New York Times, by giving each of them access to millions of users in a matter of seconds!
For Facebook, this is huge. If you run a site or two yourself, you know that the most valuable user is the one that returns more than one time. Because ad revenue fell 26% for newspapers this past year, more and more media companies are going to be focusing on social media to spread the word.
But will it work? What do you think?
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Though this may seem surprising at first glance, a closer look at a couple different aspects of either site, I think, reveals why this outcome is natural, if not obvious.
1. Fan Pages & News Feeds: Facebook fan pages are the perfect way for media outlets to consistently reach a targeted, interested audience with their content. Not only is membership opt-in, but new content posted to a given page is streamed into fans’ News Feeds. The only similar offering that Google provides is Buzz, which is a comparatively cluttered, less user-friendly experience in its current form.
2. The Variety of Google News: What makes Google News so appealing to me (and other news junkies, I assume) is that it provides myriad, varied sources that cover the same topic. In other words, there are always a lot of choices on Google News. It’s no wonder, then, that readers are choosing major media outlets less frequently through Google News. In fact, I think it’s testament to the strength of major media outlets’ brands that they attract so many loyal followers through Google News, despite the available choices.
For more of my thoughts on this issue, check out my blog post at: http://stevenduque.com/2010/03/2-reasons-why-people-trust-facebooks-news-more-than-googles/
Thanks for the comment and the insight. I think social media plays a huge roll and it will do the same for media that the newspaper when that was first printed on.
I don’t understand this article at all.
Google News is an aggregator and Facebook isn’t. New sources can have fan pages, I guess that is were the news sources are getting visitors from?
I don’t know how you can say that makes Facebook more trusted than Google news? I think the logic is something like this: because I was on Facebook and I returned to CNN.com multiple times that makes Facebook more trusted?
I think this article muddies the waters. It mixes issues, who is more trusted compared to who gets their news from the same source. Maybe I just don’t understand it though.
@Mike
I think the point the report is saying is that more people POST news on their facebook wall for others to see and more people visit news sites from the walls of their friends, as opposed to the Google News site itself.