A new paper has been published by ΕCI post -graduate students, Ioannis Angelou, Vasileios Katsaras, with credit to Dimitris Kourkouridis and Andreas Veglis.

It is published by Τaylor and Francis Online Publications, in Journalism Practice, entitled as ‘Social Media Followership as a Predictor of News Website Traffic’. The paper focuses on news organizations and the results of online advertising on their revenues. It further examines the relationship between news websites’ traffic ranking and their social media tools of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google Plus. 

The researchers monitored the followers of all Greek regional newspapers in relation to the traffic on their websites, for one year and present the results of 86 weeks’ findings. 

Their statistical analysis led to the conclusion that the metrics of social media subscribers can predict the competitive position of a newspaper in the market based on its website traffic. The effect lasts for a limited period of time, one to three weeks, depending on the specific medium. 

More Importantly, results indicate the potential development of a prediction model for the website’s traffic, based on the social media metrics of the organization, as a useful tool to increase traffic and revenues from online advertising.

See the original paper .