I’ve previously blogged about Facebook’s potential to help journalists and small websites like mine. Last month, Justin Osofsky, Facebook’s head of media partnerships, detailed more of Facebook’s power to help the media.
In a post titled, Working with Media Organizations to Build Social News, Osofsky unveils information on driving traffic, increasing engagement and an analytics system that website managers can use to track the number of times their posts get liked or shared—and by whom.
As someone who has spent a fair amount of time in sports journalism, I am used to the realization that, for most newspapers, the
sports section is the most popular with readers. Sports stories drive the most hits, engage people that are only casually interested in “news,” and lend themselves well to creating promotional items that can generate extra revenue for their perspective papers.
Europe loves its soccer (as evidenced by my picture from Real Madrid vs. Xerez in Estadio Santiago Bernabeau, September 20, 2009).
And now I have another piece of evidence to bolster my claims—Twitter announced over the weekend that the Japan vs. Demark soccer game set a new record for Tweets per second (TPS). When the referee blew the final whistle, the Twitter crew counted 3,283 TPS (They also note that the Netherlands vs. Cameroon game ended six minutes earlier). The old record? Another sporting event, of course—3,085 TPS at the end of the Los Angeles Lakers victory over the Boston Celtics in game 7 of the NBA finals. The Twitter blog also said that, “The second week of the World Cup continued to see consistent spikes in TPS after goals that are remarkable increases over our average of 750 TPS.”
Techcrunch.com goes into more detail:
Last week the all time highs were in terms of Tweets-per-second took place after goals were scored in the following games: Japan scores against Cameroon on June 14 in their 1-0 victory (2,940 TPS), Brazil scores their first goal against North Korea in their 2-1 June 14 victory (2,928 TPS) and Mexico ties South Africa in their June 11 game (2,704 TPS).
One of the most remarkable observations from this data is that none of these games involve the United States. As stateside journalists, it is easy to get caught up in our United States (note—not American) bubble. The audience for news, though, is worldwide.
So, why is this helpful for Journalists?
