S&T Live Recap: What Comms Pros Need to Know About News Influencers on Social Media

Social media influencers were a hot topic during the 2024 presidential race as both parties courted creators ahead of the election.

A Pew Research Center report from the Pew-Knight Initiative titled “America’s News Influencers,” released shortly after the election, revealed just how impactful news influencers are as sources of information about current events.

Luxuan Wang, a research associate at Pew Research Center, and Galen Stocking, a senior computational social scientist at Pew, were the guests on Feb. 20 on Strategies & Tactics Live, PRSA’s monthly livestream series on LinkedIn, and shared more insights with 300-plus virtual attendees. (Watch the session here.)

According to Pew’s research, about 20% of Americans regularly get news from so-called “news influencers” on social media. That number rises to 37% for adults under 30.

The report defines news influencers as individuals who regularly post about current events and civic issues on social media and have at least 100,000 followers on any of the five platforms — Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, or YouTube.

In the survey, “Younger adults are more likely to get news from news influencers than older Americans,” Wang said. “They’re also quite likely to trust the information they find on social media as much as they would trust information from national news organizations.”

Among the news influencers that Pew studied last summer, more than half (55%) posted content on the U.S. government, politics and the upcoming elections. Another 18% posted about social issues, while 14% addressed international issues.

Roughly equal shares of Republicans and Democrats surveyed said they received news from news influencers.

Among survey respondents who regularly receive news from news influencers on social media, 65% say the influencers help them better understand current events and civic issues, Pew found. The respondents said influencers also deliver information differently than mainstream news outlets.

“News influencers are providing unique content to these people to satisfy their information needs, which is why news influencers appeal to so many Americans nowadays,” Wang told John Elsasser, editor-in-chief of PRSA’s award-winning Strategies & Tactics and host of S&T Live.

Most news influencers do not have traditional journalism backgrounds

At a time when newsrooms are shedding jobs, more than three-quarters of news influencers have never worked for a news organization nor received formal journalism training. Their lack of journalistic background “suggests that a majority of these news influencers are outside of the traditional news industry and could bring a totally different experience to their audiences,” Wang said.

Many news influencers post content on multiple social media platforms. “They’re trying to meet their audiences where they are,” Stocking said. “And for many of them, that’s being in as many places as they possibly can be.”

About one-third of the news influencers that Pew researched also host a podcast. “News influencers are experimenting with different ways to reach out to audiences,” Stocking said.

In the Pew-Knight study, about 30% of U.S. adults who receive news from a news influencer feel they have a personal connection with that person. “Six-in-10 of these news influencers monetize their content in some way,” which is more likely to succeed when audiences feel that personal connection, Stocking said.

In this clip, Stocking and Wang offer some parting thoughts on the research:

Illustration credit: master1305

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