News Sharing Speeds across Facebook and Twitter

The final speaker in this AoIR 2015 session is Veronika Karnowski, whose focus is on news diffusion across social media platforms. The Internet has become a main source of news, of course, and social media platforms play an increasingly important role in this. Social media are now not just a source of news content, but also act as a multiplier promoting the sharing of news; and of course they also enable follow-up communication about the news.

The various social media platforms available also enable a kind of cross-pollination between different platforms, and this needs to be researched in greater detail. How do sharing patterns on Facebook and Twitter interact with one another, for example?

One approach to this might be to observe the indicators on mainstream news sites that show how often specific articles have been shared on Twitter and Facebook. Veronika's team developed an automated process that queried the RSS feeds of several leading news sites in Germany and the US, which were parsed for specific elements (title, date, category, ...); a shares tracker then queried the APIs of Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ to identify how these articles were shared over the five days following publication.

Importantly, this measures the incoming connections to the articles per se, but cannot trace the actual diffusion process itself, as it does not draw on any information about the connections between individual sharers; but it is a reasonable proxy for news dissemination. The data were gathered in September 2012, and covers some 40,000 news articles and 950,000 shares.

Two key parameters are of interest here, in the first place: the total number of shares achieved by each article, and the time it took for 50% of that total to be reached. This indicates both the total diffusion, and the speed of that diffusion process.

There are comparatively small differences in the average observations for the six news platforms covered, though their outliers differ significantly. Across different news areas, obvious differences emerge: sports news is shared more quickly than other news forms, for example, as its newsworthiness expires more quickly.

But there are some more interesting differences between the two key social media platforms Facebook and Twitter. Both are strong on wide diffusion, while Twitter is stronger on fast and wide diffusion, Facebook on slow and wide diffusion (I think – the graphs are a bit difficult to read). The same content is not necessarily equally successful on Twitter and Facebook, then.