A study by CNN of how we share and consume news has found that social media is the most frequent way that we share stories online. In their study of 2,300 people over two months they found that social media was used to share news in 43% of all instances. Higher than email, which was the second most frequent method of sharing, with 30% of all instances. SMS was third (with 15% of instances) and instant messenger 4th (12%).
These statistics should not, in themselves be surprising. Social media is the easiest of all these ways for people to share news. To share on Facebook they just need to click a ‘Like’ button, and to share on Twitter or other sites there are one-click ways to share content with your friends and followers. Many sites (including our own) include these links and buttons and news sites, in particular are making good use of these. Sharing by email or SMS is more difficult – you need to copy the link, open the relevant program, find who you want to share it with and then send the link.
Social media tools remove many of these steps and, although we don’t have any timeseries data on this, I would hypothesise that the volume of all news stories shared has increased as the amount of sharing via social media has increased. Social media makes news sharing easier and encourages more people to do it.
