What Makes News Shared on Facebook? Social Media Logic and Content-Related Factors of Shareability

Abstract

Traditional news factors are still widely recognised as explaining the functionality of news. However, the recent development of social media forces us to consider new news factors and a news genre. Building on the social media logic applied in journalism, we argue that the specificity of social media news may differ from that of traditional news. By applying the notion of shareability and its factors, we investigate the content-related features of social media news, aiming to characterise how traditional and shareability news factors are adopted in popular Facebook posts published by professional journalists. Using a mixed-methods approach and a selection of 29, 141 Facebook posts (2014–2018) from five European countries, we found a significant dominance of visual content (frequency analysis) in social media news from both opinion-leading and tabloid press. Qualitative content analysis of the “top 100 social media news” revealed that social media editors effectively merged the traditional and shareability factors. We distinguished ten groups of factors in which news factors and shareability factors entered into relationships to form attractive textual and visual social media content.