FACEBOOK is where people in the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore and Malaysia find breaking news and discover content.
“We learned that people on Facebook across (these countries) are living digital lifestyles. And much of their online activity is happening on Facebook,” the company said in the release of its findings of a survey on how people use Facebook in the five Southeast Asian countries.
The survey, conducted by global market research company TNS, said people used Facebook almost anywhere: while commuting, waiting in line or going on holidays. People use Facebook at work, at home, and even in bed, it said.
The social network has even replaced email, SMS and phone calls for many. Seventy-six percent spend less time emailing and 68 percent spend less time talking to people on the phone because they communicate through Facebook. Of those polled, 74 percent said they sent fewer SMS because of Messenger, the Facebook chat service that was decoupled from the main app last year.
People in the five countries, particularly in the Philippines, spend more time on Facebook than on the TV.
Of those surveyed, 58 percent said they first read about a breaking news story on Facebook.
This hews to recent studies on media consumption and social networks. People are increasingly getting their news from sites like Facebook and Twitter.
From the newsstands of old where we went to to look for news, we have newsfeeds in the present where news finds us.
The Pew Research Center and John S. and James L. Knight Foundation found in a survey that people increasingly see platforms like Twitter (at 63 percent) and Facebook (also at 63 percent) as sources of news. There’s a wide difference, however, when it comes to keeping up with news as it happened, with 59 percent saying they did it through Twitter and 31 percent saying they do it through Facebook. Among American millennials, Facebook has become the top source for political news, with 61 percent getting their stories from the social network, higher than from CNN (44 percent), local TV (37 percent), and Google News (33 percent). Even accounting for margin of error, the difference is still by a half-mile. What must be pointed out, however, is that by “Facebook” we mean content from CNN, local TV and the hundreds of thousands of news websites shared and consumed on Facebook.
Among those in Generation X, the difference isn’t significant, when accounting for the error margin, with Facebook making up for 51 percent and local TV at 46 percent. For Baby Boomers, local TV dominates at 60 percent, with Facebook relegated to seventh with a 39 percent share.
Data have been showing not only a move in news consumption toward digital and mobile but also to social networks.
Facebook and Twitter see information feeds, including news, as core of their products and the two have placed emphasis and a lot of resources and product development talent on news. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, for example, said last year that “the primary purpose of the Facebook app is News Feed.” The company constantly tweaks the News Feed to ensure its users are getting relevant content. Many tech companies are investing heavily on news in their platforms. The upcoming iOS 9, for example, has news as a core component of the OS. News, according to writer Tim Carmody, “is an OS-level utility on mobile devices now,” as basic as Music, Camera and Messages.
But all these happen at a time when traditional media companies are facing increasing challenges, existential even. The Wall Street Journal recently published what to traditional TV companies is a chilling graph of how people are spending less time on traditional TV in favor of Internet-based streaming services, especially on mobile.
Facebook’s dominance in media also means advertising money will move there. Making the shift even faster is the company’s easy to use and cheap advertising services that anyone can avail themselves of. For P100, for example, one can reach far more people and at such targeted demographics based on self-reported and algorithmically-gathered interests with data-rich outcome reports than what you get spending thousands upon thousands of pesos in a traditional advertising campaign.
Elections are lucrative for traditional media, with its accompanying earnings boost from political ads. But with people getting everything on social networks nowadays, we may see next year’s local political ad money heading to Menlo Park.
(max@limpag.com / http://max.limpag.com)