LinkedIn Top Social Media Site For Journalists, But What Are They Using it For?

The graphic below was included in a post on Ragan's PR Daily yesterday that I picked from my colleague Bill McLaughlin's Twitter feed. It reported on a survey published by Arketi Group, a B2B marketing and PR agency in Atlanta, on how B2B journalists use the web in general.

Certainly, the headline grabbed my attention, but the main takeaway as reported by PR Daily doesn't tell the whole story. After reading the post, I had one major question: what are journalists using LinkedIn and other social networking sites for?

From reviewing the report (available behind a conversion form), the more pertinent data is the fact that 39 percent of journalists use social networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook as their primary source of news and story ideas. As compared to data from Arketi's last survey in 2009, which showed that 10 percent used social networking sites as their primary source, this is a big jump.

The survey distinguishes Twitter as another source and shows that 44 percent use it as a primary source, as compared to 8 percent in 2009.

While there is near-universal adoption of LinkedIn by journalists, it's entirely probable that much of their use is for personal networking, as is the case with most LinkedIn users. But the data points above do support the takeaway that company spokespeople and thought-leaders should be connected to journalists on LinkedIn, Twitter and other networks and share insights on industry trends.

There are a couple of other data points that I found interesting from the survey:

• 51 percent of journalists surveyed find company webinars interesting, but for industry trends and original research.
• The top sources for news still are PR contacts (80 percent) and e-mail pitches (71 percent).

Overall, the survey is worth downloading.  What are your takeaways?