Social news is no more
30% of people in the UK say they get their news from Facebook. What are they still seeing and reading?
My news consumption habits have changed drastically while on gardening leave. (As an aside, I have four weeks left before I start my new gig, so if you're bored of the regular references to me being off, you'll be pleased to hear it's nearly over).
When you're in the thick of agency life, it's almost impossible to disconnect from what's happening in the world. Clients expect you to have a view of the world, plus broadcast news plays continually on a loop in the office, alongside regular sharing of links among colleagues.
My media diet these days mainly consist of email newsletter subscriptions, Guardian Football Weekly, LinkedIn and a bit of Bluesky (which helped me hear that, rejoice, Neil Young, is begrudgingly coming back to Spotify). That diet is highly curated and skewed to my interests.
My likelihood of stumbling on something at random has decreased considerably. Stories do slip through my filters, but more often than not, they come with a heavily meme-ified lens. I've no idea what Joe Biden said during his recent State of the Union address, but I have seen the funny face he pulled used in a million different contexts.
I'm not representative of the broader UK population, but my news-lite experience of the past six months couldn't help but make me wonder about how people consume media in 2024. The most recent Ofcom news consumption data is from 2023, and it shows that broadcast news remains the most common way for people in the UK to get news. Facebook ranks number three, with the BBC News website as the most significant single non-broadcast outlet. Like broadcast, Facebook has gradually declined as a news channel - down five percentage points YoY since 2019.
This decline is likely partly due to broader social media habits but partly also due to Facebook's editorial policies and algorithm updates. During that same 4-5 year period, Meta has gradually deprecated the amount of news shown in people's feeds to the point where it is almost non-existent today.
Unless you follow news organisations on Facebook, you're unlikely to get recommended articles in your feed. Your chances of stumbling on news on the platform have drastically reduced. In that time, the traffic media outlets received from Facebook also dropped off a cliff - Axios reports the level at 1.6% of overall referrals to news sites.
Looking at the two trends together - 30% of people in the UK still getting news from Facebook as articles and click-throughs from the platform gradually disappear - poses a significant question: precisely what news are people still seeing on Facebook?
Going deeper into the most recent Ofcom data, we can see that local news is the single most common type of media content people look for on Facebook. Groups remain a significant driver of the time people spend on Facebook, and local groups remain a big part of that. Again, using my experience as a proxy, I can say that the Farnham Herald does feature prominently in my local Facebook Group, providing a real-life example to back up this data.
BBC News is the most-followed news organisation, with nearly twice as many followers as the next biggest pages (Sky News and ITV). Interestingly, the three biggest pages are significant players in people's broader media diets, either via broadcast or websites/apps.
The overall stats indicate the broad types of news people see on Facebook. They don't answer our question of precisely what news they see. In the past, I'd turn to the likes of CrowdTangle (RIP) or BuzzSumo to get a sense of the popularity of individual articles. A simple click provides the number of social engagements for that link. It's not the most robust measurement tool. Still, BuzzSumo can at least indicate an article's popularity, which is handy when helping clients understand the potential impact of a negative piece of coverage.
But perhaps even that limited usefulness has been overstated. According to a report covered by Social Media Today, there is little correlation between social engagement with an article and people clicking through to read said article.
Just because CrowdTangle shows an article was highly engaged on Facebook doesn't mean anyone clicked through to read the whole piece. This should be no surprise, given the historically low click-through rates for news mentioned above. It is a timely reminder for agencies and clients to think more carefully about how they assess and evaluate the impact of both individual stories and campaigns.
Engagement as a metric can be a helpful outcome to track, but we should be aware of its limitations - particularly when it comes to engagement with news articles on social. In this instance, we're not seeing any engagement with the article itself - what we're seeing is engagement with the headline and short snippet that appears with the link. If your key message doesn't appear here, people won't see it on social media. Equally, if a business isn't named in the headline relating to an issue, you probably don't need to worry too much. For better or worse, very few people go beyond what they see on social.
And so, to answer our question, "What news are people seeing on Facebook?" we can reasonably surmise the answer to be: chunks of local news, alongside a surface-level sense of breaking news headlines from national news outlets, particularly the BBC.
When publishers saw significant traffic from Facebook, we could infer that a small but active portion of users clicked through to articles to get the whole story. That is clearly no longer the case.
Having a story about a client shared widely on Facebook may still provide potential reach, but it will, now more than ever, lack depth, nuance or balance. In some circumstances, that could be ideal - Iceland cutting the price of formula milk last year springs to mind. Sometimes, it may skew a complex topic or accelerate a burning issue out of control.
Businesses need to ensure they're looking at the bigger picture to understand how and where their target audiences consume their news. That means being more forensic about the impact of social shares, not simply relying on third-party tools to provide the analysis.
It means looking beyond the easily aggregated and accessible platforms and formats - at podcasts, email newsletters, video explainers. Monitoring can't just be broadcast, print, online and social anymore. Nieman Lab reported last year that more and more outlets are testing WhatsApp Channels and LinkedIn newsletters to share news. TikTok is a steadily growing news source for teens and twenty-somethings. We need the complete picture to accurately assess the impact of a story, campaign or crisis.
That complete picture will increasingly need to include qualitative and quantitative research to properly understand how sticky and memorable a campaign or issue has been for a business. Ten years ago, using social data (mainly Twitter) was an acceptable proxy for public opinion. That's no longer the case. As a nation, the UK's news consumption habits are relatively sticky - they change gradually year on year. We need to go beyond the headline data points to understand how our audiences see the world and the role media consumption plays in shaping those views. Otherwise, we'll remain disconnected from what's going on in our audiences' worlds.