European Media on Facebook
From pages to podcasts in Facebook to fan pages for acknowledged reporters, international media are focusing some of their latest marketing campaigns on Facebook.
Media outlets have started reaching their readers, their audience, indirectly: instead of trying to keep them as a loyal readership, media are focusing on new audiences, trying to take them from the Web to their outlet. And Facebook is of great help to them. The opportunity to create a Facebook page with RSS feeds, podcasts and information on forums, discussion boards and blogs is probably more valuable than a commercial not just on TV or the radio, but on Facebook itself.
Guided by my previous analysis of media outlets that carry a Twitter profile, the countries that count with more pages in the social network are England, first, then followed by Spain and France. Even though countries such as Ireland had several outlets updating content through Twitter, none of these outlets are on Facebook.
One significant difference between the outlets on Facebook is that some of them have created pages, allowing readers to become “fans,” while other outlets have groups and readers are regular “members.” Those pages -not the groups- are more developed, have more supporters and are richer in content.
The British newspaper The Guardian is the outlet with more fans, 2,111, and is the leader on amount of “print” information on the site. The Guardian’s Facebook page offers RSS feeds but no mutimedia content at all, readers cannot find photos or videos related to the newspaper or its online site. This is also the case of The Financial Times and The Sun, British newspapers as well that include on their Facebook pages from mini-feeds with their fans’ activities to RSS Feeds with content from the paper but don’t inlcude multimedia -even though this is prominent in The Sun, The Financial Times and The Guardian online sites.
The next country in number of media fans is Spain, with two outlets Elpais.com and Elmundo.es on Facebook. El Pais’s page is followed by 634 fans that have access to multimedia and print content, can engage in discussions both on the page and the newspaper site, can read notes, see photos and videos and upload multimedia content of their own too. A difference with other sites is that El Pais RSS feeds have a short blurb with enough information (which might prevent readers from going to the site to read more). El Mundo includes the same features with just one exception, its 109 fans can participate in surveys and polls carried through the Facebook discussion board, without having to go to the newspaper site.
Following in number of members are the French newspapers Le Monde, with 35 fans, and Le Figaro, a group with 62 members. These low numbers can be due to the fact that, even though the pages are available in English, the French edition of Facebook was released last month of March. However, these two pages offer as much print content as multimedia. These pages offer videos both form the news site and YouTube. Readers and members also can participate in more than discussions and forums, but also post their favorite videos and get information about events related to their favorite newspaper. Blogs are also an extra on these two pages, as they have their own RSS Feed separate from that for the news stories.
Just as developed as any of these sites is Iktavisen, the Facebook page for the Norwegian outlet. The only difference, and this might be due to the recent release of Facebook in Norwegian and that this page is very recent, is that there are no fans.
It seems that both the language -there are less Internet users in Spain than in the UK, however, Spain has the fastest growing population on Facebook, which led Facebook developers to launch a new version in Spanish before any other language-, the Internet tradition of each countries and, more important, the vinculation between print and online editions of each outlet and the percentage of Internet users with a Facebook profile are important factors when studying the success of news outlets on Facebook.
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