Online radio: A social media business?

Abstract

The phenomenal success of ‘viral’ videos like KONY 2012 has attracted even greater attention to the potential of social media for distributing traditional media content. Social media platforms appear to enable exponential increases in global audience reach via automated distribution mechanisms like “frictionless sharing” and architectures based on “social design”. But have social media really revolutionised media distribution and consumption?The chapter examines the experience of UK online radio providers in using social media, and Facebook’s “frictionless sharing” in particular, to distribute radio content. The study results from the author’s involvement in the RadioConnected R and D project, involving UK radio’s main online platform Radioplayer, and so provides a rare insight into the development of the social media strategy of major broadcasters. The chapter first proposes a new framework for analysing the behavior of traditional and online media providers and then applies the framework to analyse the social media strategies of UK online radio providers.