Our firm recently conducted a survey to better understand what social media outlets the public trusts the most as Facebook, Twitter and other platforms continue to grapple with how to deal with misinformation about the election and pandemic.
Turns out that people trust Facebook the most when compared with other popular social media platforms. It’s hard to say why Facebook is more trustworthy over, let’s say, LinkedIn.
One thought is that more people are on Facebook than other social media channels, so when you are polling 2,000 Americans 18 and over, more folks will generally say they trust whatever platform they use the most.
To counter that argument, the survey found that Twitter is the least trustworthy platform, even though it is arguably more popular than LinkedIn, which came in second to last on the trustworthiness scale.
Considering LinkedIn is a social network for business folks, it makes sense that the general population may feel distrusting of it. It’s also likely that Twitter is still recovering from a raucous election.
Another interesting statistic is that 30 percent of Americans do not trust any social media outlets. If nearly a third of survey respondents distrust where a majority of information comes from, especially amid a pandemic, we’ve got some work to do.
In the business of public relations, the essence of what we do is help people understand each other. That requires transparency, ethics and excellent communications skills, which doesn’t always happen.
The onus is on us, as PR and investor relations professionals, to champion better ethics to ensure outlets, such as social media channels, help people understand the world around them more accurately.