Social media is no longer just a platform for entertainment and has become a serious news outlet ? sometimes even a part of the news itself ? creating strange bedfellows as traditional news organizations and new media are forced together.   

With multiple recent shootings being streamed live on Facebook and Twitter launching deals with news outlets to stream more broadcast news, the industry is changing at a rapid rate. This means news sources need to focus on their social media strategies, beyond just sharing articles on Facebook, and instead create a truly native and engaging experience. 

?Social media is a major source of traffic for online news site. Social media, whether it is Facebook, Twitter or Reddit, accounts for nearly 9 percent of traffic generated for U.S news sites, based on figures from last month,? said Joseph Schwartz, digital insights manager at SimilarWeb. ?Of this, of course much has been made of Facebook in particular. 

?On June 29, 2016, Facebook announced changes to its algorithm, prioritizing posts from friends and family, and suggesting reach and referral traffic will decline for some Pages, with the suggestion that publishers of news could be hit the hardest,? he said. ?It is a measure of Facebook?s power in the partnership with digital news, and the increasing reliance on Facebook traffic, that this news was met with widespread turmoil among publishers.?

Users are now becoming content creators for news and entertainment, which further creates competition for news outlets. CBS News is leveraging Twitter to help circumvent this issue to live stream the Republican and Democratic National Conventions. 

While Twitter is diving into news broadcasting, Facebook seems to be going in a different direction. Recently, Facebook announced it will be valuing more user-generated content rather than content from publishers, and users are becoming news providers. 

In more than one case, shootings have been broadcast live on Facebook from users. The most recent showed three men hanging out in a vehicle when a suspect open fired on them. The feed continued to stream for more than an hour. 

News is now being reported in real-time through social media and it is more difficult than ever to stay on top as a news source. Publications and broadcasters need to embrace the flock to social to stay on top, even if that means losing out on revenue. 

?News sources are getting more and more traffic directly linking to concrete and specific articles instead of having users visit their home pages and browse articles directly on their site,? said Xavi Beumala, CEO of Marfeel. ?It is quite common to find publications with 80 percent of social media traffic or even more and a very small percentage of direct traffic. 

?While having more traffic is great and the audience is one of the main KPIs for the media, news sources are facing a big challenge in terms of bounce rate and recirculation,? he said. ?Increasing user engagement with users that visit a site with the only purpose of reading one concrete article is a big challenge and it's the new reality for lots of publishers. 

?Most of social media users that get to a news site read an article and then go back to their social feed. The added challenge to all this is how to keep the branding power of most of these news publications.?

It is no longer probable for publishers and broadcasters to think that consumers will come to their platforms, but instead must work on reaching them where they spend the most time, i.e. social media. 

 

Enabling rich media content and partnering with mainstream media will allow social networks a new revenue stream. It is also quite likely that by adding more ?grown-up? content like CBS News will entice an older generation to start using Twitter.

"It is quite likely that broad-spectrum social networks are very positive towards becoming news sources," said Dayle Rodriguez, community and marketing manager at Sentab. "It could be argued that they are already new sources, just not in a conventional sense. 

"Enabling rich media content and partnering with mainstream media will allow social networks a new revenue stream," he said. "It is also quite likely that by adding more grown-up content like CBS News will entice an older generation to start using Twitter."