How being first on Twitter, Facebook can make you last

Posted by Louie on Aug 25, 2010 in Facebook, Mobile, Social, Twitter | 3 comments

I’m going to suggest something so radical and against the grain that most of you will probably dismiss it as lunacy.

But here me out.

I believe that being “first” to post news on Twitter and Facebook means that you could actually be last. Very Ricky Bobby. 

Here is proof. First, let me say that when I took these screenshots I was following every local media outlet on Facebook and Twitter. That isn’t the case anymore. I learned my lesson after all the election spam I was getting.

That also means that the examples I’m using are from live election coverage from the August primaries in Arizona.

First, the photos.

Twitter

One of the big local races has been the John McCain and J.D. Hayworth battle. So getting the results out first is a big deal.

On Twitter, though, here is how it played out.

Ch. 12, the local NBC affiliate, was the first to tweet that McCain won the primary. So the station technically beat every other local outlet to post the results on Twitter.

That was at about 8:20 p.m.

I didn’t load my Twitter app, on my iPhone 4, until 8:36 p.m. That meant the first mention of the McCain victory in my feed was from the local CBS station. The NBC post was lost in a sea of others that came after it.

So CBS was the first to tell me despite having posted it more than 15 minutes after the NBC station. If I was an average reader, I might have clicked on the CBS link without seeing the NBC one.

Assuming you follow more than one, which news organization tells you news first depends entirely on when you look at your Twitter feed. This is exactly the same experience for those of you using the Twitter website, as if it were 2009.

Facebook

The first mention of the McCain victory in my Facebook deal came at 8:38 p.m. That was courtesy of the local ABC station. It had a solid news headline, a photo, and a link. Twelve people had already commented and 14 had already liked it.

It was posted six minutes before I checked the Facebook app.

Five minutes after that post, and seconds before I checked in, came another mention of the victory. This time it was from azcentral.com, where I work.

So the TV station beat us to Facebook by five minutes but anybody logging on when I did would have seen our post first.

If you’re the 8:43 p.m. reader, who broke the news?

The point?

I don’t really have a point. It just made me laugh that everybody was rushing to post big news to social media accounts but the idea of “breaking” a story is based entirely on when a reader decided to check in. I realize there are official records and timestamps that we can point to and beat our chests with.

But I don’t think readers care that much about time stamps. They just see the last post first. So always remember the genius that was Reese Bobby.