Twitter has been a popular platform for journalists and newspaper publications to drive traffic. But, a recent study shows a steep decline in the traffic flow from Twitter to news organizations.
A recent study has shown a drop to 1.5% for leading news publications. According to the data, the median tweets per post have gone down to eight, with only three clicks per tweet. The retweets are only 0.7 per post. Yet, that wasn’t the case for the top publishers, since they managed to get a whopping 11% of the audience from Twitter.
The new publishers have found it hard to drive traffic to their websites. But does the problem lie with Twitter? Or is it the content that makes a difference? The report suggests that the latter is the case.
The key to success on Twitter is creating engaging content that resonates with your audience. Sharing click-worthy content should be the priority of the news, so it is necessary to find out what the audience finds intriguing.
“There is no secret sauce for digital publishers looking to improve their success on Twitter. Sites that are doing well on the platform — achieving high levels of engagement — are not necessarily the most active; rather, they are sites that are producing interesting and shareable content that appeals to many people.” The research added.
Conversational vs. Breaking News
The report broke down the news types into two; Breaking and Conversational. It said that the news needs to be conversational since it intrigues users for a while. A typical example of this type of news is stories about the elections.
If we look at 2016 election stories, we can find over 1.6 million related tweets. It made up to 6% of all tweets. Since the topic was broad, it generated a lot of discussions and ongoing reporting, which helped a surge in the number of tweets.
Breaking news often attracts many people, but the hype doesn’t last long. The recent Brussels terrorist attack is an example that generated around 92,000 tweets within the first six hours. But, the follow-up news received minimal engagement with under 2000 tweets.
Despite publishers’ response around the type of news, Twitter remains a small traffic source for some publishers. Though it doesn’t come close to Facebook and Google, it has its own unique spot.
Has Twitter Changed News In The UK?
Twitter has changed the way readers perceive the news. A clear change is evident in how it is gathered, distributed, and consumed. UK’s leading news publication “The Guardian” reported 7 million unique users, and for the first time, the majority of them were not from the UK.
In this sense, Twitter has allowed global expansion for local news publications. The other top news agencies have also gathered an international audience. It is easier for them to penetrate new markets, which the small publications have found difficult.
Bottom Line
Twitter was responsible for over 5 percent of the referrals during the year. Despite the low numbers, the experts are optimistic that it will grow within a few years with productive usage and growing users.
