Can we translate the social media experience to news homepages?
For my master’s capstone project, I researched to what extent news publishers can include social media elements in their website and app homepages. Here’s what I found.
If we asked our friends — who are not journalists — or our moms where they consume their news, they will probably say ‘social media’.
Also, research shows us Americans as people in other parts of the world get their news from social media: according to Pew Research Center, 54% of US adults say they at least sometimes get their news from these platforms. But why is that? Because people are already there — these platforms feel natural for users. It’s where their friends, family and colleagues are, and we all have already developed habits and a routine around social media platforms.
So despite platforms changing and deprioritizing news, social media and aggregators like Google News and Apple News are still the way most people consume their news.
And newsrooms understood that — so naturally their first reaction was to build huge social media teams to post all of their content on their social media channels and therefore reach new audiences. Social media editors became almost like post machines, and in return, social became a huge source of traffic for newsrooms.
However, news organizations also started relying on social media a bit too much — so when social media companies began deprioritizing news and changing algorithms, traffic from social to news sites dropped.
But what if traffic was not the only benefit social media could bring to news organizations?
We know social media is great for brand awareness; and also it helped introduce a term that’s known but almost everyone in the media industry today: audience engagement.
For newsrooms, pageviews and traffic are still a big thing… but recently media organizations have realized a sustainable business model for news has more to do with engaging and retaining audiences — meaning building loyal relationships with readers and users. To build this kind of bond, news organizations need to understand user habits in order to design and develop the right products for them.
Also, social media companies are experts on engaging and keeping users on their platforms, so there’s a lot media companies can learn from social regarding this aspect.
So in June 2024, while I was working with the Audience Engagement team at the Financial Times, I approached my manager with the idea of working together on this project — her answer was that the AE team wanted me to help them understand what we could learn from social media — and how the FT could benefit from it.
The only part of the FT.com users can see without paying a very expensive subscription is the homepage — it’s a window to what the FT journalism looks like, and whether users are subscribers or no, this is the only way they can have a glimpse of the FT content. Therefore, together with the AE team, we asked ourselves: why not try and make this product more friendly, somewhat like the social-media experience…
Why fight social media if we can learn from it?
The first thing I did during my research process was researching features. I asked myself: what are the most ‘sticky’ platforms, homepages and apps out there? I looked at 50+ apps and homepages from news organizations from around the world and social media — but also ecommerce sites and Internet’s most-used tools.
I searched elements that made these sites attractive, engaging, interesting and different, but also in which ways these apps and sites were making users engage with the content.
So after this tour of apps, platforms and websites, I came with what I called ‘the social media mindset’ — which basically represents how people navigate social media, and also some behaviors news organizations could take from social.
These include meeting people where they are through multimedia content, especially video. Understanding people consume content on social while doing many other things — at the gym, in an uber, on the subway — and that’s why they prioritize ease of use, immediacy and briefness. Lastly, audiences on social are fragmented and prefer niche content.
So after my research phase, I decided to build some prototypes: how would the FT.com and app homepages look like with some of these social media elements?
FT.com homepage prototype:
If you want to see how the FT.com would look like with some of the social media elements I researched, you can check it out here!
These features include:
- A ‘story’ element that combines image, video and text
- A ‘charts of the day’ section — news organizations are expanding their data journalism teams, and the FT is no exception. Also, we know from analytics that charts and data-driven stories overperform in terms of web and social metrics… so why not showcase these stories in the homepage?
- Redesigning the ‘live blog’ slot to make it more appealing to anonymous readers, showcasing more stories and adding visual elements, such as time stamps
- Redesigning the ‘video’ section to showcase short, vertical video, while repurposing videos already created for social media platforms
And here’s how the app would look like:
Some of the features we incorporated include a save button that allows users to download stories and save them for later; and the ‘story’ feature, which is the same as on the desktop version.
Together with the amazing Jiaqi Yi, website designer and NYU student, we also decided to include comments below stories in the homepage — we know FT subscribers love to comment on stories and read other people’s comments; and we also know this is a social media habit as well because a lot of people, including myself, when watching a TikTok or a YouTube video are more often focused on the comments rather than the video itself.
We also changed the bar with buttons highlighting both trending topics of the day and the charts and opinion sections.
And here we can have a closer look at these sections: the charts section is pretty similar to the desktop version as well; for the opinion section we took inspiration from WhatsApp — featuring opinion stories like texts, making users feel like they are actually having a conversation with their favorite FT journalists. Lastly, we added a trends button or section for people looking to be updated on the latest news.
So to wrap up, I would like to answer the question which led to this whole project: can we actually translate the social media experience to news homepages?
Yes, we can!
However — and this might be a controversial statement for some people in the media industry — we need product teams on media organizations to think more like social media companies. And what does this mean?
As news organizations, we have to understand user habits — how, where and when people consume our news. This includes not only thinking about mediums and formats, but about the whole user experience.
Also, we need to stop depending on other platforms in a way, it’s important to prioritize our own platforms, prioritizing user loyalty — we should design products based on how readers actually consume our journalism, bringing it to them rather than forcing them to come to us in ways that don’t feel natural anymore.
Lastly, we should always have in mind the thought of what’s ahead, thinking about the readers and news consumers of the future.
You can see the full recording of the presentation of my project here (I’m the last one)!
