Years ago, when microwave ovens were new, I remember
seeing a cartoon of a man standing in front of one with the caption: “Hurry up!
I haven’t got all minute.”
Today, when trying to load a page on the Internet, that
caption might read: “Hurry up! I haven’t got all ten seconds.”
That’s what Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook suggested in a recent online Q & A when asked about that platform’s role in news.
“People discover and read a lot of news content on
Facebook, so we spend a lot of time making this experience as good as possible,”
he replied.
“One of the biggest issues today is just that reading
news is slow. If you’re using our mobile app and you tap on a photo, it
typically loads immediately. But if you tap on a news link, since that content
isn’t stored on Facebook and you have to download it from elsewhere, it can
take 10+ seconds to load.
“People don’t want to wait that long, so a lot of people
abandon news before it has loaded or just don’t even bother tapping on things
in the first place, even if they wanted to read them.”
The way Facebook is solving the lengthy wait to get news
is Instant Articles.
Says Zuckerberg: “When news is as fast as everything else
on Facebook, people will naturally read a lot more news. That will be good for
helping people be more informed about the world, and it will be good for the
news ecosystem because it will deliver more traffic.”
Still with Facebook (and Twitter), a new Pew Study shows that users across all demographics are increasingly using them as sources of
news.
According to the report, 63 percent of both Facebook and
Twitter users say they get news on those social networks, up from 52 percent of
Twitter users and 47 percent of Facebook in 2013.
Although the same percentage of users look to each
platform for news, nearly twice as many use Twitter to follow breaking news: 59
percent of Twitter users versus 31 percent of Facebook users.
About half of people between the ages of 18 and 34 say Facebook
and Twitter are “the most important” or “an important” way they get news,
compared to 34 percent of Facebook users over 35 and 31 percent of Twitter
users over 35.
The study also found that Facebook users are more likely
to engage with political content than Twitter users: 32 percent of Facebookers
post about politics and government, compared to 25 percent of tweeters.
That finding corresponds to an earlier Pew report that showed that 61 percent of Americans born between 1981 and 1996 get their
political news from Facebook in a given week.
Only 37 percent of Americans in the same age group get
political news from local TV, compared to 60 percent of Americans born between
1946 and 1964.
Bottom line? Facebook and Twitter are becoming the channel of choice for news for growing numbers of people today. What this means for non-profit communicators is a big question; we normally don't have the heft to break into the news cycle, the urgency to command attention, or the ability to get our information into Facebook's Instant Articles.
Looks like we need to hope our supporters have at least ten seconds worth of patience for our web pages to load.
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