A response to Twitter comments from UTS journalism students during our presentation on Monday, April 29, 2013.
Another look at the Facebook leaderboard
In August, we published the Facebook sharing rankings for Australian news sites, counting all stories that earned 100 or more Facebook shares. The top five was: Ninemsn news News.com.au SMH.com.au The Age Herald Sun Recently we went back to the data to count total Facebook shares (likes, comments, shares) by adding the long tail of stories that received [...]
Facebook v Twitter
We need to talk about Twitter. Specifically, we need to talk about the relative power of Twitter and Facebook. The graph below totals all shares of 260,000-odd stories published to Australian news sites and it paints a stark picture. In the Share Wars, Facebook is the weapon to master. While Twitter is obviously influential, particularly among media [...]
News Limited zombies trample share data
We have noticed something weird with sharing figures coming out of News Limited sites. Since February the share count on individual articles has become so unreliable we have had to discount the data. Publications affected include news.com.au, the Courier Mail, Herald Sun and Daily Telegraph. The problem became apparent when we noticed that the “sharing [...]
How priming can give you the social edge
The easy thing about working with our data is it’s retrospective. We’re neatly classifying stories that have already happened. A more difficult mission is to predict what will share in real time as stories are written and distributed through the news ecosystem. We’re working through our current crop of data with the aim of doing just that – establishing a replicable framework [...]
What the Baden-Clay saga tells us about sharing
Gerard Baden-Clay was charged with murdering his wife, Allison, after a canoeist found the dead woman next to a creek in Brisbane’s west 10 days on from her mysterious disappearance in April last year. The great-grandson of Scouts founder Lord Robert Baden-Powell reported his wife missing on April 20, telling police she had never returned from a walk the night [...]
Marking the Moment – the death of Jim Stynes
Jim Stynes spent his final moments with his wife and two children. It was an intimate end to a very public two-and-a-half year battle with cancer. As understandably private as it was, Stynes’ death was also an event of the people. Australians were determined to mark it and remember the life of one of Australia’s greatest [...]
How Share Wars categorizes stories
The first data collection period of the Share Wars project ran from March-June 2012. In that period we tracked every article published on the homepages of 118 global news sites. We tracked the articles’ share counts at regular intervals over a 24-hour period – on Facebook, Twitter and a few other social networks. In total we [...]
Snakes on the brain
The Share Wars team faces two big challenges as it continues to analyse the data capture from last year. First, the practicalities of getting our arms (and heads) around a data set of several million stories has tested our Excel “skills” and the processing power of Excel itself. Even more challenging has been the development [...]
How to make contagious content
We have been investigating the essence of shareability in news content for just over a year. After collecting data on a lot of shared content, both within ninemsn and from other publishers, we have developed certain rules of thumb for shareable content creation. We do not claim to have a single, consistent recipe for creating [...]
The Share Wars team
Andrew Hunter is Editor-in-Chief of Microsoft's Windows 8 Bing apps. He is doing an MBA at Macquarie Graduate School of Management.
Twitter: @Huntzie
Hal Crawford is ninemsn's Editor-in-Chief. He began his career at The West Australian newspaper and has taught journalism at La Trobe University in Melbourne. Twitter: @halcrawford
Domagoj Filipovic is ninemsn's Commercial Development Program Manager. He has developed the Share Wars Likeable Engine, which tracks sharing of news stories in real time.
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