We live in a very digitised world where more and more interactions occur online. All these interactions leaves a data footprint what creates ‘digital identities’. In a perfect world these identities would allow companies to gain valuable understandings about their consumers. About what they like and dislike and their individual needs and desires.

Sadly, our perfect world isn’t that perfect. More than two third of UK consumers say that they providing false personal information about themselves. Most of the time this is because of concerns about how the data will be used. And even if the information is right, consumer behaviour evolves over time so the data will be soon no longer correct.

But how can you make sure that the delivered data will be correct in the first place? It all comes down to building trust. If consumers trust that their email only will be used to communicate with them, companies can trust that the data consumers share will truly reflects who they are.

Loyalty schemes are fast becoming the way in which marketers search for their data, but consumers have to be willing to sign up to them in the first place. Once they have, companies need to ensure they’re leveraging the data they collect in the right way. To be sure that they will engage with and retain their consumers by giving them the best personalized experience. Having a clear understanding of your consumers is the only way to give them truly understanding and tailored services.

Disruptors are already taking benefit of their agility and effectiveness in their use of data sources to disrupt industries all over the world, and the value these positive consumers experiences generate can’t be undervalued.

For now, the challenge for companies will be to build trust and to use data for the good of the consumer. The technology has been around for a long time, but it needs a mind shift that sees data as an extension of an personalized identity and not just as an commodity.

http://www.edelman.com/insights/intellectual-property/2016-edelman-trust-barometer/
https://hbr.org/2016/08/how-the-big-data-explosion-has-changed-decision-making
http://www.marketingtechnews.net/news/2016/sep/28/ bad-data-decisions/

Nowadays it is extremely important to use compelling headlines to make sure people notice them in their timeline. They can only see a title and that must trigger the reader to click on it and visit the website. Besides this effect there are more ways of how social media has an influence on digital publishing. In this post I will discuss five effects:

Compelling headlines
More and more people use social media to find news online. Because of this the headlines are more important than ever. People will decide to read or skip  the news based on the headline. When you have an interesting headline people will click on the post and read the news, and some people will even share it on their social media page. Hereby you will reach a much broader public and more potential clicks to your website. Overall, an compelling title is essential to drive people to your website.

Death of the homepage
The homepage of the website from the newspaper was always the first thing that people saw. The cause of the death of the homepage is social media. Since social media enable users to discover news in their timeline, people don’t bypass the homepage anymore but go directly to the news article. Research found out that 62% of older adults from the US get news through their social media sites and younger adults see social media as a main source for news (Pew research centre, 2016). News articles that goes viral will earn a lot more page views than the homepage. So we can conclude that the homepage is losing popularity and people visit the website through different ways. But entering the articles via another door than the homepage’ is more popular.

Shorter visits on the website
Don’t cheer to early when someone visits the article page. Most of the people only scan it and returning back to social media. Visitors that arrive directly on the website spend on average 4.36 minutes on the website and visit 24.8 pages per visit. On the other end spends visitors that are coming from Facebook 1.41 minutes on the site and visit 4.2 pages per visit on average (Pew research centre, 2016). More page views and spending a longer time on the website are essential because it increases conversations and brand awareness. It is important that the pages match the environment the reader came from (so they feel more comfortable) and give relevant information. When information engages the readers it will make them click through when you have links to other articles that are relevant for example.

Algorithms
The fact that you can use social media as a distribution platform is an big opportunity. You can reach more people than ever before. Because of social media you will have more visitors on your site but it also means that you will be dependent on social media as well. A lot of publishers need to use the role of social media in the editorial process. This is because they feel the need to show up with content that the algorithm of a social media platform likes the most.

The growth of the citizen journalist
Nowadays almost every human on earth owns a smart phone. It is not difficult anymore to take photos or videos and posting stuff online whenever you want. People that account information and who are not specialised journalists are called a citizen journalist. These so called citizen journalists can increase the old-fashioned journalism in speed of reporting and having a higher reliability because they were eyewitnesses. The news is spread in just one click. Therefore it is important to find out what is the real news for the publishers.

We can conclude that social media has a high impact on digital publishing. Social media gives publishers the opportunity to reach a broader audience. But on the other hand they becoming more and more dependent on social media platforms and need to regain control.

Publishers should take the power back by bringing social media to their website. They have to add some social media content to editorial content because it gives the visitors from social media a warm landing. They will stay more in the social media mode and don’t need to go back to the platform.

Sources:
https://gigaom.com/2014/02/14/people-often-retweet-without-reading-data-shows/
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/jul/12/how-technology-disrupted-the-truth
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2485277,00.asp
http://www.journalism.org/2016/05/26/news-use-across-social-media-platforms-2016/