Social overtakes search for referral traffic on news stories

Many big stories, including Cecil the Lion, Charlie Hebdo and Ahmed Mohamed, were driven by social

You get your news online. That is pretty much a given at this point. Now comes the next question: where are those stories coming from? Where are people seeing those links to click on them? Increasingly that answer is social media.

Looking at a bunch of different news stories from the past 11 months, publishing analytics company Parse.ly found that the majority of them saw more referrals from social media than from search, the company unveiled on Monday in an Authority Report.

Among those stories covered in the report were the death of Bobbi Kristina Brown, the Ahmed Mohamed incident, the killing of Cecil the Lion, and whatever that whole deal with Rachel Dolezal was.

I want to break out a few of them, which have to do with tech in some capacity, and how social may have affected them.

Charlie Hebdo

First, given what happened in Paris last week, the most interesting right now is the Charlie Hebdo attack, in which 12 people were murdered by terrorists due to their provocative magazine. The story was one of the most covered news topics of the year and, at its peak, Parse.ly's network published more than 1,300 posts in one day on the subject.

"Readers chose to navigate directly to breaking news on publisher websites about this topic more than any other we examined. Searching and sharing increased as the story developed," the company said in its report.

Of the referral traffic, 17 percent came from social media, while 11 percent came from search.

The reason this is interesting is that, increasingly, social media is becoming a haven for people in areas affected by these kinds of attacks. Facebook, for example, opened up safety check so that people in Paris could let everyone know they were ok. They have since done the same after a bombing in Nigeria. 

Twitter users, meanwhile, set up the hashtag #PorteOuverte as a signal that it was a place for people to go so they could be safe.

The Paris attacks were not included here because they took place outside of Parse.ly research period , which covered January to October of this year. But it would be extremely interesting to see if these moves by Facebook and Twitter increased the amount of referrals to stories on the attack.

Ashley Madison hack

The Ashley Madison hack that happened over the summer, the one that cost the CEO of the company his job, had a much higher rate of search referrals than social, 28 percent to 15 percent.

The story was huge, and got a ton of coverage, because everyone loves it when other people get taken down a peg (just wait till it happens to you!) but it looks like almost nobody was sharing it on social media. 

According to Parse.ly, that's because people had some amount of shame. 

"Our hypothesis is that the elicit, and possibly amoral, subject matter was something that people wanted to read about, yet didn’t want to show their social networks publicly. If this is the case, it’s a good example of how psychology plays a role in shaping media traffic," the company wrote.

A sense of shame? On Facebook? You should see what my friends post! Still, that does raise an interesting question about whether social media is actually a good place to get news. Are we only going to be informed based on the whims of people we know?

The Mayweather Pacquiao fight

This fight had the largest percentage of search traffic, with 31 percent, compared to only 16 percent from social. And that may because of the long build up.

"Interest around the match peaked on fight day, but it was building long before the event—with 66.4% of readers finding articles via search engines versus social media," said Parse.ly. "• Social networks took over shortly after the match ended, though overall interest declined significantly."

I also wonder how much of that had to do with how people were watching the fight. Many were streaming it illegally on apps like Periscope and Meerkat. Given that interest was going to be highest during the fight itself, perhaps that was not a conducive way to share information.

Obviously the places we get our news is evolving quickly, and while social networks are good places to get easy access to information, searching is also a good way to go more in depth. That is usually how I read stories; I find out about them from my friends, but then go and read as many articles as I can about them by trying to find more.

(Image source: nydailynews.com)