News + Social Media = Social News?
How do you find news on the web? Do you go straight to your favourite blogs and news sites or do you use an RSS reader? Or are both of these options too old hat?
This article posted last year on Read Write Web found that use of RSS feeds declined last year.
The answer to why this is is probably the same as the answer to probably 60% of questions asked over the last 6 months: Twitter.
A quick glance at my TweetDeck shows that a large proportion of my friends’ tweets are links to blogs or news stories that they find interesting. Now, most of these people I’ve chosen to follow because I find them interesting (some because they’re my boss), and as such, their selection of news and blog posts will probably interest me too. And it does; the system works, without Twitter, I never would have heard about this.

It’s all part of news becoming more social. We share the news stories we find interesting, and sometimes cut out the middleman and create the reports ourselves. So clearly, Social Media is changing the way we get news.
A Challenger Appears!
There’s been a recent post on Facebook’s blog suggesting that they too, want to enter the arena of social news. It’s here. What they suggest is using Facebook as a feed reader. This makes a lot of sense as a lot of news providers already have pages on Facebook, Facebook already has a feed structure that is inherent to the site and a pre-existing social aspect that RSS services such as Google Reader would have to build from scratch.
What Facebook is suggesting is using their ‘list’ feature to create yourself a little news feed. I made one and it looks like this:
It’s a nice idea, and one with quite a bit of potential as Facebook’s user figures are estimated at around 250 million active users, compared to Twitter’s 20 million. At the moment, there are only a few news providers who are actually active on Facebook, and most of those are US focused. The Guardian has a page, but is using its updates to post news about itself, rather than actual stories.
For this to really take off news providers will have to take Facebook seriously and publish their content in edited headline form to encourage click through to the main article. Unlike RSS, no one wants whole chunks of text appearing in their Facebook feed. The best example of how to do it properly is from the New York Times:
Another obvious benefit of this is the social aspect of Facebook. With commenting functionality built in, users can engage with one another and discuss news stories. Of course, Facebook being Facebook, most of these comments will inevitably be as lucid and informed as these ones:
The effect of commenting on posts is a key part of why this could be such a good idea. In a similar way to how I get news on Twitter, when people comment on a news post, they’re essentially sharing it. Regardless of whether or not I’m ‘subscribed’ to a news page, if one of my friends comments on a post, it has a chance of appearing in my normal Facebook feed, thus spreading the story.
Of course, this is something that we’ve known for a long time, and is why we encourage brands to set up their own Facebook pages in order to spread their message in exactly the same way. Most of the methods used by news agencies trying to break into social media can be applied to wider fields. Think of it as spreading different types of stories in the same way.
What do you think? Will this sort of thing end up replacing RSS feeds?
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jocosasmith
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Roger Warner, C&M
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