New research from Gartner helps explain why newspapers aren’t just failing in print, but online, too: Newspapers publishers are failing to take advantage of social media and the loyalty of their online readers.

Gartner found that newspapers are not helping their readers to use social media to act as influencers. The problem starts with a failure to optimize search at their sites and carries on to a lack of integration between content and social media functionality.

Key Findings:

• 49 percent of readers use general search engines (such as Google and Yahoo) once a week or more to find content, but only 20 percent use search tools built into a newspaper or magazine site;
• Only 24 percent of those surveyed share good content “finds” with friends or others via personal communications — such as e-mail and instant messaging (IM);
• Only 7 percent said they usually or often share content via embedding into social network sites.
• Although many newspapers list their staffers who are on Twitter, few offer Twitter users the ability to “tweet” stories from their Web sites.
• When asked what they do when they find interesting content online, more than half of respondents (52 percent) said that they usually read it immediately. Only 9 percent said that they bookmark it to read later.

While newspapers have incorporated social media content, they haven’t taken the step of integrating social media tools into their content management “ecosystem” to provide pervasive deployment of important social features.

Big media publishers are pressuring Google to give them better placement in search results; Gartner’s research shows that, by failing to integrate social media tools, publishers are contributing to their problem.

Gartner’s research

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