Research: majority of readers of articles via Facebook do not remember site name

A majority of people who click on articles via Facebook do not remember exactly where they read them. This is according to a study among 6811 Britons. About 44 percent were able to name the site on which they read the article the next day if they found it on Facebook.

Readers who came directly to an article, such as via the home page, were able to remember which news organization had published the article in 81 percent of the cases. For social media it was 47 percent, with Twitter users scoring higher than Facebook users: 55 to 44 percent. If users searched, 37 percent could remember the medium.

Researchers from the Reuters Institute at Oxford University say the results are worrisome for news media because users often don’t associate their names with articles they’ve read. There was a difference between readers of various British media. Readers of articles on The Guardian and Buzzfeed more often withheld the source than The Mirror and The Independent. Young people were found to remember where they had read the news better than older people.

The researchers followed the panel members in their surfing behaviour. In doing so, they looked to the previous page in history when reading an article on one of the 20 most popular news sites in the United Kingdom. If that was a page on the same domain, that counted as direct traffic. If that was a search query, it counted as a reader entering through a search engine, and if the previous page was a social medium, the researchers assumed that platform was where readers came across the link to the article.