As with many of you, the 2024 Reuters’ Digital News Report continues to give us much to reflect on even months after its release. While there are many learnings from the report, the one chart that stood out to us was the “proportion that used each network for news.”

While the major drop for Facebook was anticipated (given Meta’s strategy to deprioritize news), we found ourselves asking: has the news hit its high-water mark on social media, and if so, how do we adapt?

Since 2018, algorithm changes on social media have prioritized user content over public content, including news. This shift has reduced the benefits for news organizations on these platforms. We asked the report’s author Nic Newman for his reflections. He explained that the decline in the “post and refer” model is due to platforms favoring formats like video that keep users engaged within the platform. In this blog, we’ll explore how publishers can navigate and maximize their presence on social media in this changing landscape.

Leveraging video

Posting videos on social media has grown to be a strong means of developing brand awareness and engagement with audiences. However, production costs (financially and operationally) have historically been much higher than text-based content. Monetizing video on social media also proves to be a challenge with video requirements being strict and unrewarding unless scale is achieved:

Aside from these requirements, social media platforms require videos to fall within their community guidelines and be “ad-friendly”. TikTok has a much more controversial requirement that videos must not contain sensitive or controversial topics (which are rather loosely defined). Videos that have been deemed controversial are either faced with being demonetized or being placed with limited visibility on user feeds. In other words, unless a user is actively looking for news publisher content, it will only rarely appear on their feed. Nieman Lab conducted a study which found that TikTok’s algorithm made it unlikely and difficult for news organizations to reach users.

Engaging your audience

While social media no longer drives the same traffic as it did, it still serves as a powerful avenue to connect and engage with your core audiences away from your website which has become increasingly important as platforms promote posts which users engage with more. While a more tailored engagement varies per platform and your audience.

Videos are currently the strongest way to engage an audience on social. While they are difficult to monetize, they are effective in capturing the audience’s attention and driving curiosity to read more. The challenge is capturing your audience within the initial five seconds before they scroll along in the ether of social media. You can do this by showing preview clips of the video or providing a quick summary at the beginning to engage your audience right away.

Another effective practice is featuring your journalists. This provides a face for your audience to interact with and helps them develop a deeper relationship with your publication. Putting them on explainer videos showcasing their expertise, retweeting their tweets to provide them a platform or having them directly communicate with interested audiences through Whatsapp or Instagram broadcast channels can help develop deeper levels of engagement.

Lastly, developing interactive content such as polls or gamification features is a strong opportunity to get your audience to interact with your social media page and open themselves to conversations and discussions.

These practices may change as time passes and algorithms evolve. But traditional news publishers have lots to learn from social media first publications who have already navigated social media through experience such as Brut (French), Will Media (Italian), and dw_berlinfresh (Germany).

Each platform plays a different role

The social media landscape continues to evolve and constantly presents itself with new challenges. However, we cannot deny the importance of the platform in reaching audiences who may not otherwise engage with the news. With Facebook still boasting over 3 billion active users and Instagram, YouTube and TikTok around 1.5-2 billion active users, social media is still an invaluable tool in connecting and engaging with your core audience while reaching new audiences as well.

However, given recent changes, now is the time to reimagine the role of each platform in the context of news:

• Facebook – given its large reach – is still helpful in slowly converting new audiences into regular readers through peer-to-peer exposure of your content by focusing on virality, as Facebook itself has stated.
• YouTube, on the other hand, offers a strong opportunity for monetization. Publishing long-form video content on the platform can help diversify revenue streams for your publication with the right audience. 
• Instagram and X may still hold opportunities for traffic even though a much stricter link placement policy has taken hold (though lenient in comparison to Facebook’s policy). However, it is important to recognize that both platforms serve distinct needs:
  • X focuses on real-time updates and discussions around current events, politics, and social issues.
  • Instagram focuses more on visually appealing content to drive engagement. This is evidenced by the International Journal of Research in Marketing which finds that posts with a certain combination of characteristics are likely to receive 19% more engagement.
• TikTok remains an unknown quantity. However it is a platform worth exploring, especially for those trying to reach younger audiences. 55% of TikTok’s user base in the United States are those aged 18-34 and the global average watch time of short-form video is 95 minutes a day. 
• WhatsApp has seen growth as a popular platform for news distribution particularly in countries where mobile usage is high and access to traditional media is low such as Brazil, India, and South Africa. WhatsApp can potentially be used to directly connect and engage with audiences given its nature as a message platform, allowing journalists to develop a more personalized connection with your audience.

These are only a few strategies you can employ in each platform, but understanding their strengths and leveraging them towards your publication may help bring added value.