Abstract
Due to the rising importance of social media platforms for news diffusion, newspapers are relying on social media editors to promote the distribution of their news items on these platforms. In this study, we investigate how much of an impact these social media editors really have, focusing on the impact of newspapers’ public pages on Facebook. Since the actions of individual users are not visible on many platforms due to privacy consideration, we propose a method that leverages time series of aggregated scores for total user engagement, which are available for various platforms. We use this method to study and compare the influence of Facebook pages for six newspapers from the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Flanders, for all news items published over 2 weeks in 2017.
Highlights
Due to the rising importance of social media platforms for news diffusion, newspapers are relying on social media editors to promote the distribution of their news items on these platforms
The after FB score is the upper limit of the engagement that resulted from the newspaper’s Facebook page, for which the percentages vary around 53.2%
Given the limitation that data on individual user engagement with news items are generally not available due to privacy considerations, we leveraged the use of aggregated engagement statistics
Summary
Due to the rising importance of social media platforms for news diffusion, newspapers are relying on social media editors to promote the distribution of their news items on these platforms. Since the actions of individual users are not visible on many platforms due to privacy consideration, we propose a method that leverages time series of aggregated scores for total user engagement, which are available for various platforms We use this method to study and compare the influence of Facebook pages for six newspapers from the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Flanders, for all news items published over 2 weeks in 2017. Anyone can share links to news items, regardless of whether the newspaper itself shares these links, which is made easy through the widespread availability of social media buttons—social media plug-ins on websites that allow people to directly like, comment, and share content (Gerlitz and Helmond, 2013) This involvement of individual users in the selection and distribution of news leads to “increasingly complex relationships between news production and consumption” (Goode, 2009: 1304) that warrant new research and debate. In addition to providing new empirical insights into the role of social media editors for newspapers on Facebook, we argue that this method has promising applications for other questions regarding news diffusion on social media
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