Editors' Blog | Journalism.co.uk » Traffic

After taking a look at the top 10 Facebook news stories of 2011 and the top 10 Twitter news stories of 2011, we’ve compiled a list of the most shared, liked and commented on Journalism.co.uk news stories and blog posts published in 2011.

1. Julian Assange wins Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism (5,268 likes, 1,523 shares, 768 comments)

2. Guardian predicts 1m installs of Facebook app in first month (613 likes, 85 shares, 95 comments)

3. BBC developing new iPhone app for field reporters (98 likes, 172 shares, 80 comments)

4. Daily Mail criticised over Amanda Knox guilty story (53 likes, 86 shares, 138 comments)

5. How to: become a roaming reporter (62 likes, 37 shares, 85 comments)

6. Al Jazeera English hits US screens after New York cable deal (75 likes, 60 shares, 33 comments)

7. ‘Is there a better way of doing this?’: Johann Hari responds to plagiarism accusations (12 likes, 47 shares, 88 comments)

8. Bahrain to sue Independent over ‘defamatory’ articles (99 likes, 31 shares, 2 comments)

9. #jpod: How journalists can best use Facebook pages (58 likes, 53 shares, 4 comments)

10. London riots: Five ways journalists used online tools (40 likes, 64 shares, 10 comments)

Data was gathered using Searchmetrics.

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Tool of the week for journalists – Rippla, for tracking the social ‘ripples’ of news stories

Sarah Marshall — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 11:55:30 +0000

Tool of the week: Rippla

What is it? A tool that allows you to monitor the social media “ripples” of a news story

How is it of use to journalists? Rippla was launched last month as a tool that tracks how news and information reaches into people’s conversations on social media.

It may be interesting to find out that the story with the most “ripples” is currently the Mail Online’s Hilarious video shows cat stroking crying baby and sending him to sleep, followed by George Monbiot’s Guardian comment This bastardised libertarianism makes ‘freedom’ an instrument of oppression, But what is particularly helpful for journalists is the ripples tracker.

Ripples tracker allows you to enter the URL or a news story and see how many times it has been shared on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networks and find out how many bit.ly click-throughs the post has received.

Rippla also offers news sites a widget than can be added (as embedded below), which displays the most socially shared news stories.

Most popular news stories

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The top 10 most-read stories on Journalism.co.uk, 10-16 December

Joel Gunter — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 17:20:24 +0000

1. I thought McCanns knew about diary, Myler tells court

2 Nick Davies: Everybody accepted Dowler story was true

3. Tool of the week for journalists: Facebook search

4. Guardian: NoW ‘not responsible’ for false hope voicemail deletion

5. Ofcom names 20 cities for local TV licenses

6. Daily Mail owner confirms ‘no mud slinging’ pact with Richard Desmond

7. McCann diary reporter: I thought we had permission

8. Mail: Dowler question was perfectly legitimate inquiry

9. PCC censures Mail Online for Knox verdict report

10. Tony Maddox, CNN: is the most demanding year we can remember

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The top 10 most-read stories on Journalism.co.uk, 3-9 December

Sarah Marshall — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 16:36:58 +0000

1. Top 10 Facebook news stories of 2011

2. Express & Star publisher announces up to 50 job cuts

3. Lebedev and Kelner launch Journalism Foundation

4. Top 20 most clicked news stories on Facebook in 2011

5. Five tips for writing an effective press release

6. Tool of the week for journalists – Buffer, for scheduling tweets

7. Top 10 Twitter news stories of 2011

8. Trinity Mirror merger sees creation of Media Scotland

9. Media release: Reuters announces global extension of Journalism Trainee Program

10. Guardian study finds just 22.6% of journalists are femaleSimilar Posts:

Guardian’s Facebook app delivering 1m extra hits a day

Sarah Marshall — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 11:24:17 +0000

The Guardian’s Facebook app is generating almost a million extra page impressions per day, according to figures released by the news outlet and by Facebook.

Two months on from its launch at Facebook’s f8 conference in London the app has been installed by over four million users.

The news outlet also believes that the app is engaging a younger audience, as over half (56.7 per cent) of the app’s users are 24 and under and 16.7 per cent are 17 and under.

Andrew Miller, chief executive officer of Guardian Media Group, said in a statement:

As well as increasing traffic, the app is making our journalism visible to new audiences. Over half of the app’s users are 24 and under – traditionally a very hard-to-reach demographic for news organisations

The Independent, the other UK-based news outlet to launch a Facebook app following f8 on 22 September, is reporting that it has more than one million monthly active users connecting their Facebook accounts.

The integration has bumped up older articles that have gone viral through social distribution, according to the Facebook post detailing the statistics.

The news organisation found that many of the “most shared” and “most viewed” stories on the site have been from the late 1990s, “a result of the increased social virility”.

The Guardian and Independent both took a different approach when building their Facebook appshe Guardian focused on the reading experience within Facebook, the shared reading experience for the Independent takes place on the news site.

Yahoo! News, which like the Independent integrated the app into its site, has reported that 10 million people are using the app, with Yahoo! News experiencing a 600 per cent increase in traffic coming from Facebook as a result.

People who connect to Facebook on Yahoo! read more articles than the average user, the Facebook post states.

Like the Guardian, the Washington Post built a social reader app for Facebook as a companion for its website with the social sharing taking place within Facebook. It has drawn more than 3.5 million monthly active users so far. The Facebook post states that the social reader is growing, especially among international audiences and younger readers, with 83 per cent of readers under 35 years old.

According to Facebook, the statistics released last night show that the apps do five things:

1. Show recommendations to increase engagement. Keep people engaged by prominently showing friends’ recent activity on your main pages and pages with high exit rates. When no social content is available, surface personalised recommendations based on users’ interests on Facebook and clearly explain why you’re showing each recommendation.

2. Create compelling objects. Maximise the click through rates of your stories by specifying Open Graph tags for all your articles and including compelling images, titles and descriptions. Avoid misleading images or titles to prevent your app from being marked as spam, which will negatively impact your app’s distribution in news feed.

3. Leverage your existing user base. If you have an existing site, be sure to make connecting a prominent option for existing users. And if people are already sharing your content on Facebook, consider sending referral traffic from Facebook into a flow that makes it easy for people to have a social experience on your site.

4. Make the benefits of sharing clear. Open Graph apps are designed for people that want to share. In your app, you should clearly explain how your app works and the benefits of adding your app to their timeline. Choose an approach that makes the most sense for your users, whether that’s an informative dialog, in-line marketing messaging, house ad inventory, and/or a learn more page.

5. Keep users in control. As we’ve previously highlighted, people are more active when they are in control. In addition to the privacy controls on Facebook, we encourage you to build controls into your app that fit how people use your app.

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The top 10 most-read stories on Journalism.co.uk, 19-25 November

Sarah Marshall — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 17:48:40 +0000

1. Mail titles hit back at Grant over ‘mendacious smears’

2. Ten things every freelance journalist should know

3. Sky News faces contempt charge over kidnap coverage

4. How to: best post news on Twitter and Facebook

5. Steve Coogan claims Andy Coulson set up ‘sociopathic sting’

6. Tips for freelance journalists on National Freelancers’ Day

7. Mother of Hugh Grant’s baby: press made life ‘unbearable’

8. Guardian apologises to Sun for Leveson doorstepping claim

9. Max Mosley: Press had ‘no human feeling at all’

10. Syrian cameraman ‘mutilated and killed following arrest’Similar Posts:

Future reports 6m app downloads in six weeks

Sarah Marshall — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 17:22:29 +0000

Six million apps of magazines published by Future Publishing have been downloaded since the launch of Apple’s Newsstand six weeks ago.

In the first month since launch, the magazine publishing company, which has apps of 65 UK titles, made $1 million in the increased business, Mike Goldsmith, editor-in-chief of iPad and tablet editions at Future Publishing, told Journalism.co.uk in a podcast on how Apple’s Newsstand is revolutionising the publishing industry.

Newsstand, which launched on 12 October when Apple released iOS 5, is an iPhone and iPad home screen app that acts as a direct portal into a new magazine and news publication section of the iTunes App Store.

Future, like other publishing companies, has appealed to customers by offering free downloads of particular back issues, with iPhone and iPad users responding by downloading five million free editions.

Goldsmith said initial statistics are encouraging with 40 per cent of sales being made up of subscriptions rather than individual editions.

Other publishers are also reporting an increased impact. Daryl Rayner, managing director of Exact Editions, which works with publishers to create digital editions, reported “very pleasing results” with 15-30 per cent of subscriptions taken out on an annual basis rather than as 30-day subscriptions and renewals at 85-88 per cent.

Chris Talintyre, head of direct and digital marketing at Factory Media, which publishes 27 websites and 19 magazines, reported more than 850,000 downloads and initial sales data for October showing a month-on-month increase of 150 per cent since Newsstand’s launch.

Goldsmith said Newsstand is “absolutely intrinsic to the future of Future Publishing,” which yesterday reported a £19 million loss, largely because of a slump in print in the US.

Future said that its UK operations had been “resilient” overall, with revenues falling just 2 per cent.

US losses were “partially offset” by growth in digital revenues, which saw a 25 per cent hike.

Goldsmith illustrated how the iPad and Newsstand is changing the magazine market with the example of Comic Heroes, a special edition, bi-monthly magazine. On the physical news stand “it does okay”, he said, but “it’s a special edition and no one expects it to do marvellously”

But on Newsstand things are different.

It’s our second biggest page turning, flat app. It has gone through the roof because it is a brand that means different things to a different device. And that means we will invest in the title in terms of IP, in terms of staffing, in terms of marketing, in a way that we previously probably wouldn’t have invested in to that extent.

Is it going to revolutionise our business? It could do, it could well do.

I think the next 12 months are gong to be very, very interesting indeed.

Click here to hear more statistics and how Newsstand is revolutionising magazine publishing.Similar Posts:

FT web app has been used 1m times

Sarah Marshall — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 17:48:00 +0000

The Financial Times is reporting that its web app has clocked up one million hits since it was launched in June.

Around 45 per cent of users have bookmarked the FT web app to a iPhone or iPad, replicating a native app experience by providing an app icon on the device’s home screen.

The app, which is free to download but through which content is limited due to a cross-platform part paywall, saw 150,000 uses in the first 10 days; five months on it has achieved one million clicks on the app.ft.com url.

The web app, built with HTML5 technology, has two advantages for the FT over its previous native iPhone and iPad apps: it avoids the FT paying Apple a 30 per cent cut, the charge for any music, app or book publisher selling through its store, and the FT gets to access and own its audience data.

In a post on its blog the FT said the web app has “significantly boosted mobile and tablet traffic”.

FT.com now sees 20 per cent of total page views and 15 per cent of new B2C subscriptions each week coming directly from mobile and tablet devices. These readers are also more engaged, with FT.com users who register on mobiles and tablets 2.5 times more likely to subscribe, as well as being more active in giving feedback.

The FT has also produced an infographic.

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The top 10 most-read stories on Journalism.co.uk, 12-18 November

Sarah Marshall — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 17:30:33 +0000

1. Stephen Lawrence judge refers Spectator over possible contempt

2. ‘Wherever there was news, we went’: Libya’s ‘A-Team’ fixers on getting the story out

3. How to: get noticed by journalists

4. Ten free apps in the Chrome web store that journalists should know about

5. Phone hacking: Tom Watson attacks BBC over coverage

6. More than 50 Trinity Mirror jobs under threat in Midlands

7. Coverage of Libyan conflict dominates Rory Peck Awards

8. Rippla, a site to monitor the social media ‘ripples’ of news stories, launches

9. Tool of the week for journalists – WhenToTweet

10. Independent and Standard announce merger appointmentsSimilar Posts: