I’m Mad As Hell And…
I’m Going to Post an Angry Emoji on Facebook.
It doesn’t quite have the ring of that famous line by news anchor Howard Beale in the 1976 classic film Network, does it? But that may be the new mantra of news today. You want to know why? Video postings by news operations on their Facebook pages get more angry responses than just about any other kind of postings. That’s one of the many findings you’ll see from the latest Newswhip quarterly report on Facebook interactions.
There are two key “take-aways” for journalists looking at the report. First is the issue, already mentioned, of anger response. The second is the more abstruse but still critical issue of video usage and importance for news pages on Facebook.
TAKE-AWAY #1
The first issue about the how anger responses play into news page reactions may not be too surprising, but maybe a bit disturbing when you add in the fact that only two other video postings get such a reaction and they’re designed to get such reactions.The two non-news sites were PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) and a page linked to the Hong Kong Police Force. You can pretty well see the emotional hot button those pages hit. The issue is what ‘hot buttons’ do the so-called news sites hit.
DISCLAIMER #1: Let me preface the following statements by noting that I really dislike the labeling of people as conservative or liberal/ progressive. I understand that it is a shorthand way of describing sites and sources, but in reality most people would probably fall in the ‘moderate’ range.
Two sites use the cliched phrase: “liberal media bias.” Those sites are Newsbusters and MRCTV. Together with Fox and Friends, they got roughly 32.8 Million ‘interactions.’ As much as they are ‘alt-right,’ there are sites that some consider ‘alt-left.’ For arguments sake, we will put Huffpost and ‘The Other 98’ in that category. Those two get 26.8 Million interactions. But to those two, we should probably add two more which I will confess I was not familiar with — ShaunKing and WashingtonDCPress. Together they add another 21.8 Million interactions. That brings the total for ‘liberal/progressive Facebook pages to 48.6 Million angry interactions.
The numbers raise questions about the common assumption that the alt-right sites are pushing the hate button. That would require more analysis than this summary can provide. There is clearly though a big difference between getting angry and inciting hate. So one could ask whether that means news is part of the solution, as we like to believe, or part of the problem, as critics contend.
Of the top 10,000 videos, the most common reaction, not too surprisingly, was the simple ‘like’ (48%), followed by ‘share’ (26%); then ‘loves’ (12%), ‘comments’ (6%) and ‘hahas’ (6%). No ‘wows.’ No ‘sads.’ No ‘angry’s.’
POINT OF CLARIFICATION: When you look at the report you will see three types of video listed: Native, which is video created and posted to the page; Linked, which is explanatory in that it is a link on the page, but not on the page; and Embed which is video that is coded into the page.
The second issue is how video plays into news engagement. When it comes to general video usage, the top video pages on Facebook are the same ones that seem to always turn up: LadBible and UniLad, which are British entertainment and video sources aimed at “lads” which is the British expression for a young man.
But THE top source of ‘engaged’ videos was yet another site which I will admit I’ve never heard of: FirstMediaBlossom. It accounted for seven of the top ten videos, getting anywhere from 3.4 Million to 7.5 Million engagements for each posting. In case you hadn’t heard of it either, it describes itself as “cheat sheet for creative and unique DIY projects.” Basically every posting by this group is video. The other three top engagement pages were The Bible Series, KC Stauffer and Daijiworld news, based in Mangalore, India.
When FirstMediaBlossom is taking out of the mix, the report shows a second theme of sorts in the videos with the highest enggement: They’re fun; They’re diversions. Ice cream video. Little guy blows out candles. Kid has non alcoholic shot with bartender.
When you look at the Facebook pages with the highest share, you get a third theme — cooking. TheMagicalSlowCooker scores the highest rate of shares followed by Eatingonadime and BestRecipeBox. And when you look at the Facebook pages with the highest rate of comments, you get a fourth theme — fashion. The highest comment score went to Missguidedcouk, followed by Boohoo and Iloveshowpo. Yes, I had to look up all those pages because I had not heard of any of them.
Interestingly, there were no news pages figuring in the top ten of shares but two news pages did make it to the top ten in comments: NewsHour and ABCNewsPolitics.
TAKE-AWAY #2
But to the second major point I saw from these numbers — Likes and Engagements do not necessarily correlate. I had thought, like many people, that the more likes a site has the more engagements it will have. Nope!
DISCLAIMER #2: Newswhip uses the term ‘engagements’ as a catch-all for Likes, Shares, Comments as well as the various Emojis. I would suggest that may be too broad a use of the term when some of the responses are more accurately simply ‘interactions.’
However, the folks at NewsWhip do have this, a good term for explaining how to generate traffic.
Regardless, take a look at this screen capture. The two top contenders are not shown — LadBible and UniLad. They have 37 Million and 44 Million “Likes” respectively. But they have five and six times that number of ‘engagements.’ Take a look again at the screen capture. What is missing? Hint: It’s a news source, a MSM news source. Got it yet? Give up?
It’s NBCNews. I didn’t notice this at first glance but after studying the graphic for a while it suddenly dawned on me. ABCNews is there. CBSNews is there. FoxNews is there. NBCNews is not. What makes that even more unusual is that when you look up NBCNews on Facebook, it has nearly 10 Million likes.
That’s less than FoxNews (17.3 Million) and less than ABCNews (14.2 Million) but significantly more than CBSNews (6 Million). Why? That’s a good question. Somebody at NBC needs to think about this.
Here’s another question for you. What else stands out to you? Here’s another hint: think about what I said about the comparisons for LadBible and UniLad. I’m talking about the numbers for the three networks. What do they tell you?
Well, here’s my take: CBS is doing a good job of engaging with its Facebook users. It is getting six times as many engagements as likes — a ratio very similar to the two leaders. ABC meanwhile is getting three time as many engagements as likes while Fox is ‘only’ getting twice as many engagements as likes. Again, the fact that likes and engagements do not correlate raises all kinds of issues about what counts as a successful posting.
Interestingly two sites at opposite ends of the political spectrum can claim similar bragging rights as UniLad and LadBible, and CBS. They are TheEpochTimes which is an alt-right publisher and NowThisPolitics which is, while not exactly alt-left, definitely liberal or progressive. Both have roughly six times as many engagements as likes, clearly hitting people’s “hot buttons” emotionally if not necessarily intellectually.
Two final ‘factoids’ to wrap up this essay.
1 — The average length of the top 100 videos on Facebook was 132 seconds.
2 — The average length of the top 100 videos on Twitter was 23 seconds.
So our new, and news, media world is being measured in seconds.
What does this all come down? It’s something I’ve preached in my many consulting sessions. To be successful you have to ENGAGE people. Yes, it’s that magic word again. For the news media that is especially tough. They’re walking a tight rope, or if you prefer, doing a juggling act — balancing what people “need to know” with what people “want to know.” And to do that, you have to think about the song from… here comes another movie mention… Mary Poppins: “A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.”
Here’s the link to the full NewsWhip report:
https://www.newswhip.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Fall-Social-Video.pdf
