Why headlines matter
From the Herald
According to a new study by computer scientists at Columbia University and the French National Institute, 59 per cent of links shared on social media have never actually been clicked: In other words, most people appear to retweet news without ever reading it.
Perhaps appropriately, the Herald passed on this story from the Washington Post without passing on their link to the research.
If you were reading carefully, you might notice the last part of the paragraph doesn’t actually fit the rest: it isn’t that ‘most people‘ retweet news without ever reading it, it’s that most retweets are done without reading (or before reading). Even with that caveat, the research says that headlines matter — and I’m going to keep complaining about them.
The main focus of the research was something different, though. They were comparing clicks on the ‘primary’ URLs from the media site itself with the clicks on shortened URLs produced by readers. Although the primary URLs had the majority of ‘impressions’, the secondary URLs added up to more clicks. That is, when news stories are actually read via Twitter, more often than not it’s because of a personal recommendation by someone else who has actually read the story.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »