The media battle for (financial) news continues!

Just like in 2012, ING, Social Embassy and InSites Consulting have probed Dutch consumers about their awareness and attitudes around financial news on traditional (offline), online media (news sites, weblogs, discussion boards …) and social media (Twitter, Facebook, Hyves, Google+,…) sources. How do consumers treat news from these three different sources? How reliable do they find these sources? And does this news impact their knowledge, attitude and behaviour towards financial products and institutions? We asked 1.500 consumers representative of the Dutch population.

Size, trust & impact

Some key take aways that are worth mentioning here are:

  1. In 2013 online and social media are still considered important ‘news channels: 69% of the respondents follows news items in online media (decline as compared to 2012) at least weekly and 57% on social media (stagnation). When it comes to financial news, exposure was significantly lower on both online and social media as compared to 2012. By contrast, the buzz around financial institutions on social media (Twitter, Facebook,…) increased by 23%.
  2. In general, consumers’ trust in media has declined. This is true for all types of news on all three media platforms. Of all media, traditional media are the most trustworthy, social media the least: two in three people don’t put their trust in them. What happened?! It’s interesting to think about what may have caused the decline in trust in all media. Recent negative incidents (like Project X in the Netherlands) where the role of the press was found to be rather questionable can be an explanation, next to the nation-wide decline in overall consumer trust.
  3. Finally, traditional media are just like in 2012, the most impactful in terms of knowledge, attitude and behaviour (still 5 to 6 time more impactful than social media). But also online (mainly news sites) and social media have impact, especially among youngsters. Social media messages e.g. have resulted in knowledge change for 31% of the youngsters, 26% reported change in attitude and 25% in behavior.

Want to learn more?

The full results of the study have been summarized in an animated video and an infographic, and the full report is available on SlideShare (in Dutch).

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