Social media and the sharing of a Forbes story

Lewis Dvorkin, the chief product officer at Forbes, writes about how social media is changing business journalism.

Dvorkin writes, “Here are three charts for current and would-be journalists to ponder. The top two speak to the future — how the convergence of social and mobile influences the life span of a post. The Forbes.com post on employee compensation was shared 170,000 times. Notice the mobile-desktop page view split and how it played out over a week. Our post on athlete earnings, with only 4,500 shares, followed a similar pattern. The third chart reflects an older era, or at least one that will end sooner than most think. The throat cancer story started and finished via Yahoo YHOO -2.79%, rising dramatically, then disappearing. Its traffic was mostly desktop, likely speaking to the age and workplace composition of the portal’s audience. The post’s 5,700 shares, proportionally much lower than the other two stories, also indicates a mobile-first audience is far more inclined to share than desktop users.

“There are many take-aways from this data. It’s been clear for some time that social equals content discovery. Now it’s just as evident that mobile is a social discovery device that leads to content discovery. Its power lies in diverse connections that form a long tail of interested news consumers. Yahoo tells a different story — a portal with a less socially engaged crowd, or one without smartphones at the ready. Its desktop power is far more confined to the head of the audience tail. Of course, the case could be made that the first two stories appealed to a younger, mobile crowd and the third to an older, office desktop consumer. I tend to doubt it, given the universal interest in health-care stories.”