One of the key findings of the Reuters Institute Digital Report 2014 is:
Our new (and unique) social media index for news shows Facebook is by far the most important network for news everywhere. Although Twitter is widely used in the US, Spain, and the UK, it is far less influential in many other European countries. Google+ is emerging as increasingly important for news, along with messaging application WhatsApp.
This raises a couple of questions:
– Why does my Facebook timeline mostly never deliver any news to me – although I liked some important news organizations on Facebook. I’d really like to know more about Facebook’s timeline algorithm in this regard.
– I never perceived WhatsApp as medium for news delivery. Basically, I still have it installed on my iPhone, because it’s one of the few apps, that my mother know how to use on her smart phone. So, how does WhatsApp for news work?
If you have any good online sources on this, please let me know by commenting this article.
Picture: CC – Scott Beale on Flickr
Question 1: At some point in 2014 Facebook changed the rules – since then organizations had to pay for their news being shown on your timeline. That might be a good thing for facebook as a means of making shareholders happy – but the flow of information apart from selfie stuff – suddenly decreased.