Top 15 German News Titles on Facebook and Twitter - June 2015
World to win for all titles on Facebook, and is Twitter Germany’s dark horse?
With the digital domination of news, it has become imperative for news media to shift their focus to online distribution, to better deploy their editorial capabilities on social media, to maintain their market share.
Each month at Nine Connections, we look at the potential reach of news media on social media. In our analysis, we look at the total amount of unique visitors to the website of a news publisher. We analyse different variables and extrapolate the expected potential and offset this with actual potential in order to study the performance of each news source.
Based on this number we are able to estimate what the expected reach should be on social media.
Top Performer on Facebook
What is striking about this dataset is that none of the news media in the top 15 have reached their expected potential on Facebook. The best performing news media is Tagesschau that has reached 74,28%. It needs to be noted that Tagesschau does the daily news on TV and hence has extra reach, compared to traditional news suppliers. Even though, there is room for improvement.
The publisher who could use more traction on Facebook
Spiegel (ranked third with over 6 million unique visitors) is the news media that is clearly under performing on Facebook, they only hit 10,74% of their expected fan potential. This implies that Spiegel has a massive growth potential within their social media engagement for Facebook. They could reach a much higher level of traction.
Top Performer on Twitter
The data for Twitter once again shows that Tagesschau is the best performer on Twitter. They have an expected fan potential of 285,600 followers but have an actual follower base of 676,462 outperforming their expected fan potential by 236,86% (as mentioned before they are a TV-news show, this could explain their massive popularity online because the daily news usually has an institutional status).
The publisher who could use more traction on Twitter
Die Zeit (also ranked high, at fifth, with 5,165,000 unique visitors), is the news media that is clearly under performing on Twitter, they hit a social media fan potential of 10,15%. Once again, this means that Die Zeit has a massive potential to grow their fan base on Twitter and could reach a much higher level of traction. It is also interesting to note that, concerning Twitter, Spiegel hitting 60,16% of their fan potential performs markedly better compared to Facebook.
Facebook vs. Twitter
Interestingly, it’s remarkable to note that when looking at the expected reach of followers on Twitter versus likes on Facebook, the data shows clearly that the relative percentage of expected reach is much better on Twitter. Twitter might be smaller in Germany than Facebook, which holds true for most countries, but this means it has greater growth potential. Moreover, research shows that Twitter is a more popular social media for individuals looking for news and current events and developments. This makes it highly important for news media. However, it is also notable that all news media don’t reach their full potential concerning Facebook engagement, it seems there is world to win there as well.
Give us your input!
This analysis is used internally by the company as a research mechanism to understand market behavior and performance on social media. Today we’ve decided to share this data on social media to see what you think? Would you like to read your news on Twitter or Facebook? Would it make a difference to you if your favorite newspaper didn’t have a presence here? Or otherwise, do you have a conclusion or an opinion or insight about this information? Tell us!
Article put together by Anthony Gadsdon and Smruthy Sachidanandan
[1] The data is built up as follows. The first column shows the amount of unique visitors to the website of a certain news media. The second column shows the news media’s rank based on their amount of unique visitors. The third column shows the expected amount of fans as calculated by Nine Connections (38% of Germans with internet access have a Facebook page and 21% have a Twitter account, so multiplying the amount of unique visitors with this percentage results in the expected fans potential). The fourth column shows the actual amount of fans on Facebook. The final, fifth, column shows the percentage of the expected fan potential that the news media has obtained.
