Reuters takes the social media pulse
Jinfo Blog

By Penny Crossland

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Facebook is becoming a major source for finding and sharing news, as reported by Nancy Davis Kho here last year. This was confirmed in November by a Lightspeed Research survey, which showed that in the UK 15% of all news consumers and 30% of all 18-24 year old news consumers went to Facebook first to read about current affairs.

With Facebook going from strength to strength, especially after its $5 billion IPO filed on 1 February, it is little wonder that the traditional news suppliers are revising and improving their social media strategies in a bid to keep their customers onside.

Last week, Reuters launched its own news curation service called Social Pulse, designed to be a hub for the most talked about news on the web. Users have access to news shared by Reuters journalists via their own Twitter accounts, all arranged in headline format, as well as the most read Reuters headlines.

A value added tool is the stock sentiment graph, which shows the most talked about companies by sector and correlates their “social sentiment” to their stock price. Another interesting feature is a ranking of the most social media savvy CEOs using a scoring system devised by Klout. All this is rounded off by “The Conversation” – comments on topical issues via a variety of social media platforms.

What is interesting about Reuters Social Media is that it is not only a news hub for Reuters’ customers. It can also act as a user sentiment tool for Reuters’ editors, showing them what their readers are talking about and the kind of news they want to see on the site.

The launch of the Social Media venture follows hard on the heals of the new Reuters YouTube channel, which according to Zdnet has 10 channels filled with news, commentary and analysis.

Other news companies, such as Dow Jones, have been jumping on the social media bandwagon. It also launched its own YouTube channel last week, which features on demand Wall Street Journal video content and live programming. And all for free! – how is that going to tally with the newspaper’s paywall?

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