Journalists view social media as complementary, not threat

It found that day-to-day journalists are undertaking background research, rapid information gathering and opinion mining using social media on a daily basis.

Most popular

However, more interactive methods of social media such as crowd sourcing for research, asking interview questions and liaising with PRs featured much lower on the breakdown of their daily use. Of those surveyed, 87% view social media as being complementary to traditional journalism as opposed to a threat.

Facebook dominated as the most popular social media platform for journalists internationally (86%) apart from in the UK where LinkedIn crept ahead. Twitter was voted the second most popular tool among journalists (61%), apart from in Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary where the younger platform Google+ was more popular.

However, the online tools journalists use for researching varied internationally. In the UK (75%), UAE (93%), South Africa (68%) and Sweden (50%), Twitter came out on top, while in the Eastern European countries (Poland, Czech Republic and Hungary) Twitter's popularity came second (25%) to Facebook (71%).

Social interaction

As for how social media is changing the way journalists interact with communications professionals - journalists in the UK placed less importance on personal contact and phone conversations (59%), with email cited as the most important source for their day-to-day job (80%), while social media featured very low (17%).

Whereas their Polish counterparts still favour more traditional methods of communication with (90%) citing personal contact and phone conversations as the most important source for their day-to-day jobs. The top three most important sources for journalist across the globe were email (75%), search engines (68%) and personal contact (70%).

Social, but cautious

When it comes to the potential pitfalls of social media, journalists appear to be approaching it with care with over three quarters (77%) of those surveyed agreeing that the speed of social media and lack of control over sources will be a problem for quality standards in journalism, except in Poland where over half (55%) agreed with this statement.

Four in ten journalists agreed that certain skills were needed to do research or write for social media. However, over three quarters of journalists surveyed stated that they have never been on any social media related training. Despite this, most journalists feel that their knowledge of and competency in using social media is average (55%), rather than very good (37%) or bad/non-existent (8%).

Lutz Cleffmann, Marketing Director of ECCO International, says, "The survey shows clearly that social media has become an important channel of interaction with journalists, but the importance of channels varies very much from country to country. Therefore local knowledge stays an indispensable prerequisite of success."

Very often we as South African's sell ourselves short," says Regine le Roux, MD of Reputation Matters (ECCO representative in South Africa). "Being a part of the international communications network and having the opportunity to participate in these global surveys, shows how globally competitive we are and that we are right up there when it comes to international trends."

The survey was conducted in January and February 2013, in Sweden, Switzerland, Czech Republic, Brazil, Australia, United Arab Emirates, US, Poland, Hungary, South Africa, UK and Italy.