The regional press soars on social media

Pity the poor newspaper publisher as they take delivery of their latest circulation figures. Life isn’t easy when you’re facing the perfect storm of digital competition, falling advertising revenues and the high costs of maintaining even the most efficient newsroom.

When things are this tough, you’ll take any good news. So how about triple figure growth on social media? It seems that people are still turning to the regional press for their local news but instead of picking up the print edition, they connect to the “parish pump” via Twitter and Facebook.

According to the latest ABC figures released by Trinity Mirror, social media represents a huge area of growth for many regional titles.

The Birmingham Mail, The Coventry Telegraph and The Daily Post (Wales) saw Facebook “likes” increase year-on-year by more than 100 percent. Increases in Twitter followers were equally impressive for many titles.

If you were judging the success of a publication based on circulation figures alone, you could say that many newspapers were now more successful social media organisations than print media publishers.

For example, The Birmingham Mail, now has a print circulation of 24,260 copies compared to a Twitter following of 135,557. While it would be foolish to compare the quality of a newspaper’s print circulation with a much less accountable social media following, it does confirm that newspapers publishers still carry significant influence or clout.

The real challenge is converting this social influence into something that pays the bills. Website traffic and associated advertising revenue is perhaps the most obvious answer to this significant problem – although this (as any newspaper advertising manager will tell you) is proving rather more difficult than it would appear.

The commercial future of many of our regional (and national) titles cannot be found in traditional advertising platforms (print or digital). Recognising the importance of social influence and harnessing its power to catapult news brands to become more commercial enterprises (beyond advertising) has to be a vital first step towards the future.