Application of social network to keep audience for local news engaged

Recently, Pew Institute released a report of its Internet Project Surveys on the use of social networks by older adults. The document reveals that older adults have been especially enthusiastic about embracing new networking tools. According to the report, social networking use among internet users aged 50 and older nearly doubled—from 22% in April 2009 to 42% in May 2010 (http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Older-Adults-and-Social-Media.aspx).

Though currently teens and adults are still the heaviest users of social media, the surge in the number of older social network users outpaced the increase in that of the younger generation. The new trend is interesting and exciting enough to bring our attention to the potentials for media outlets, especially TV stations, to take full advantage of social networks to keep in close interaction with community members, most of who are also viewers of local news.

As KOMU-TV advances in building its outreach by using both Facebook and Twitter to attract the maximum size of local audience and provide the most updated information, I would see the system not only as a tool to disseminate information, but also a source to utilize the wisdom of the crowd. The rise of social journalism in the past few years have demonstrated that consumers are more interested in news that they are closely related to, and are more engaged to the contents to which they have contribute to. With popularity of new technologies with older groups, we may use crowdsourcing to obtain some information that our reporters have yet to obtain, or check the facts that are yet to be confirmed. The point of crowdsourcing in the process of news producing is that the talent and work of a group of people, who are simply audience in the traditional settings, is superior to that of a single reporter or a few. The individuals among the audience, especially older viewers, may be expertise in some area. And that knowledge can help our station gain ratings and produce higher quality news.

The other insight social network offers us is that we can use them to grow up our audience. Since younger adults have social networks as a tool for daily communication, they obtain a significant amount of information (news) from the resource as well. Studies have shown that younger people tend to watch TV for less time. But TV news may cut into this particular group with developing its social networking system. If the young become loyal followers of TV stations, hopefully they will become viewers of the same channel when they turn into TV news viewers.