Social News and clickthroughs

Based on some fantastic clickthrough numbers for news links shared on Facebook, we’re seeing new interest in what the Social Networking giant will be doing to change News’ face.

Image by jared via Flickr

The core concept is this: links of interest shared by one friend get clicked-though by others. As of this writing, links to stories posted on Fb are clicked through by friends 3.5% of the time.  (perspective: links on Google News are clicked through .5% of the time; ads – text or banner – are clicked through between .1 – and 1% of the time – 3.5% is a significant improvement).

Facebook, from the outset, has been interested in – and working toward – “graphing” your friends and relations: Who do you know and how do you know them? “Which of those relations yield the most clicks?” is a new area of interest.

News organizations pay attention when the “What are my friends reading?” question is answered with new visitors. And once you nearly quadruple Google’s success rate at something, you can bet interest is well-piqued.

The Huffington Post has made way for readers to share every HuffPo piece they look at:

At HuffPo Social News … Facebook users can see what their friends have been reading and exchange stories and comments with them.

A special report on social networking: Global swap shops | The Economist

We take a more curated approach: True/Slant’s shared news links are in the form of “Headline Grabs” that Contribs share with their community. A core driver of True/Slant is interest in the Contributor: our platform is built around Contributors and their community members. Contributors here have complete control of the stories appearing on their site. We provide tools, distribution, and guidance; Contribs provide their PoV, hard work and devoted community.

HedGrabs are a simple way for Contributors to share what they’re reading; the idea is “If you like Mark’s writing, you might also be interested in what Mark’s reading.” We currently get about the same clickthrough rate Google Reader does. I bet we can do better - We need to find more creative ways to get those shared news links in front of the community.

It could also be interesting to see what some community members were reading, too. We have 50,000 members and more than a million monthly visitors – how do we get them more involved? Going back to our Contributor-centric model, we could enable Contribs to say “This is an especially interesting member of the community. I’d like to see what else she’s reading.” And it would be interesting to see how the rest of our community responded to what was being shared.

With Google’s forays into social news and clickthroughs, we’ll want to get moving.