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Toward ‘Cultures of Engagement’? An exploratory comparison of engagement patterns on Facebook news posts
Abstract and Figures
Information production, dissemination, and consumption are contingent upon cultural and financial dimensions. This study attempts to find cultures of engagement that reflect how audiences engage with news posts made by either commercial or state-owned news outlets on Facebook. To do so, we collected over a million news posts ( n = 1,173,159) produced by 482 news outlets in three Scandinavian countries (Denmark, Norway, and Sweden) and analyzed over 69 million interactions across three metrics of engagement (i.e. comments, likes, and shares). More concretely, we investigate whether the patterns of engagement follow distinct patterns across national boundaries and type of outlet ownership. While we are skeptical of metrics of engagement as markers of specific cultures of engagement, our results show that there are clear differences in how readers engage with news posts depending on the country of origin and whether they are fully state-owned or private-owned outlets.
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... In addition, with the transformation of media technology, we are entering the "engagement" era (Ferrer-Conill et al., 2021). Consistent with the acceleration of customer participation evolving into customer involvement, numerous studies have still classified these relationships as having no profound bonds (Myrick and Erlichman, 2020;Yamamoto et al., 2020;Barari et al., 2021). ...
Introduction
With the advancement of new media, brand communication has been taken into consideration by lots of firms. Apparently, customer affection plays a significant role in brand communications, though few studies have determined how the twofold of information function works in this communication mechanism. Based on this research gap and practical background, this paper proposes a hybrid model of communication comprising the utilitarian and hedonic aspects.
Methods
For this study, 575 questionnaires were collected, followed by the structural equation modeling of the derived data to test the research model.
Results
The results of statistical analysis show that the brand communication can be improved in terms of both utilitarian and hedonic aspects. Moreover, psychological contract and customer engagement play a chain mediation role in this mechanism.
Discussion
These findings contribute to the research of brand communication mechanism in digital era. Likewise, the findings offers several practical implications to the brand management.
... Moreover, online journalists now have direct access to accurate, precise quantitative feedback regarding their readers behavior: how many clicks they made, how much time they spent on a specific page, how many of them abandoned an article (Carlson, 2018;Cherubini & Nielsen, 2016;Christin, 2018;Ferrer-Conill et al., 2021;Hanusch, 2017;Zamith, 2019). These same numbers are what digital media is selling to advertisers. ...
In traditional journalism, sensationalism was a characteristic of tabloid press. The main instruments used in sensationalistic headlines were bombastic epithets (awesome, amazing, greatest etc), and exaggerations used to increase the impact by curiosity. In the last decade, transformation with society and online media consumption behaviour have triggered a change of paradigm: we believe that we are facing a post-sensationalism media narrative, defined by catastrophism and the fight paradigm. In the context of a huge news feed overloaded with information, in the purpose of increasing the number of views of online media, the journalistic discourse has transformed radically and switched from informative to a more aggressive approach. The study shows that in Romania, the pursuit for clicks has generated a new discursive paradigm, a sort of post-sensationalism era, which we referred to as catastrophism and fight paradigm. This conclusion is based on quantitative and qualitative research that analysed Romanian online press headlines and content in approximately the same period of time both in 2018 and 2019. The research followed the frequency and context of usage of a few hashtags and keywords connected with our main concepts of concern: sensationalism, catastrophism, fight paradigm. In other words, we selected a few words that are, in our opinion, the most representative for the aforementioned concepts, and, with the use of professional instruments of press monitoring, we analysed their frequency and dynamics.
... Audience engagement is usually understood as the sum of metrics such as comments, likes, replies, etc., depending on the platform. Yet, it is important to understand that these different components of engagement have different affordances and can serve different functions (e.g., Ferrer-Conill et al., 2021;Savolainen et al., 2020). Also empirically, it has been shown that the number of, for instance, shares, likes, and comments of political content is not influenced in the same way by the same predictors (e.g., Judina & Platonov, 2019;Larsson, 2018;Trilling et al., 2017). ...
This study examines how female politicians are using Instagram to present themselves to the electorate and how this affects audience engagement. A manual content analysis was conducted to explore how female politicians, compared to male politicians (N = 40), use Instagram in terms of visual self-presentation, the use of masculine and feminine issues, and how this may lead to increased engagement (i.e., likes and comments). In total, N = 762 posts were manually analyzed. The study shows that female politicians receive more likes when they are visible in a picture compared to male politicians. It also reveals that male and female politicians both refer more to feminine issues than to masculine issues, although the use of feminine issues resulted in less likes. We find that some issues lead to more discussion amongst Instagram users, and that this differs between male and female politicians. The study sheds light on how politicians use Instagram and offers insights into how (female) politicians can use the platform to their advantage.
As an integral part of their online strategies and business models, news outlets diffuse their online content on social media platforms such as Facebook to increase traffic. They thereby succumb to the contingencies and constraints of third platforms infamous for their sudden changes in algorithms. In this article, we assess engagement patterns of 140,359 Facebook posts of 17 Belgian news brands between March 2020 and 2021. We map out differences in audience engagement of news outlets' Facebook posts related and unrelated to the COVID-19 pandemic and differences between mainstream and alternative news outlets. We find that COVID-19-related posts generate more engagement and more so for mainstream media than for alternative media outlets.
The datafication and platformization of social processes further the overall shift from an open, public, and decentralized internet towards a private and siloed realm that establishes power asymmetries between those who provide data and those who own, trade, and control data. The ongoing process of datafying societies embraces the logics of aggregation and automation that increasingly negotiate transactions between markets and social entities, informing governance systems, institutions, and public discourse. This thematic issue presents a collection of articles that tackle the political economy of datafication from three main perspectives: (a) digital media infrastructures and its actors, data structures, and markets; (b) the articulation of data power, public access to information, data privacy, and the risks of citizens in a datafied society; and (c) the policies and regulations for effective, independent media institutions and data sovereignty. It concludes with a reflection on the role of media and communication scholarship when studying sociotechnical processes controlled by giant technological companies.
Informed by the theoretical framework of media effects and resonance theory, this study investigates how issue obtrusiveness and information richness as message attributes, and media hierarchy and orientation as source characteristics influence audience engagement with news posts on social media. The data of news posts (N = 943,793) from the top 99 Sina Weibo accounts of Chinese media with likes, comments, and reposts as indicators of audience engagement were retrieved. Through multilevel modeling, the study finds that source characteristics exert stronger effects on audience engagement than message attributes, and the effects on comments differ from those on likes and reposts. The association between issue obtrusiveness and comments is stronger than that between obtrusiveness and likes/reposts. Posts of high information richness draw more audience engagement than posts of low information richness. Through their news posts, central-level media attract more engagement than local media. The implications of the findings are discussed.
This article combines two prominent discussions in media studies and industry: the challenged economic situation for independent community news and the complex relationship with digital platforms. Through empirical data, it assesses current incomes and the impact of platform companies on management practices in the UK. It finds that building your social media following, particularly on Twitter, correlates to higher income. Independent community media also report utility benefit from digital platforms for audience growth, the provision of analytics and story suggestions. Direct returns economically from advertising are less forthcoming and publishers feel subjugated by policymaker and platform opacity. Through a mixed method approach, we conclude social media practices can have positive indirect impact on the news revenue model, but absent direct returns mean management frustrations persist
In the face of ongoing digitisation, The Markets for News examines how certain established economic features of the news industry have persisted and what makes them such stable frameworks for journalistic organisations.
Drawing on an analysis of Scandinavian news industries, this text revises journalism’s economic foundations in the context of the algorithmically driven platform economy. Exploration of features such as journalism’s two-sided market model, the network effect of platforms, and chain ownership, leads to a discussion about how journalism faces disruption from the introduction of artificial intelligence in the production, dissemination, and sale of news. As journalism undergoes transformations due to revenue losses, this book recognises a return to certain enduring features of journalism’s organisational form, in particular the chain ownership form, that enables scale in adapting to platform logics and economics. This text serves as a basis for a theoretical discussion about strategic media management and critical political economy in the age of digital disruption.
Audience engagement has become a key concept in contemporary discussions on how news companies relate to the public and create sustainable business models. These discussions are irrevocably tied to practices of monitoring, harvesting and analyzing audience behaviours with metrics, which is increasingly becoming the new currency of the media economy. This article argues this growing tendency to equate engagement to behavioural analytics, and study it primarily through quantifiable data, is limiting. In response, we develop a heuristic theory of audience engagement with news comprising four dimensions—the technical-behavioural, emotional, normative and spatiotemporal—and explicate these in terms of different relations of engagement between human-to-self, human-to-human, human-to-content, human-to-machine, and machine-to-machine. Paradoxically, this model comprises a specific theory of audience engagement while simultaneously making visible that constructing a theory of audience engagement is an impossible task. The article concludes by articulating methodological premises, which future empirical research on audience engagement should consider.
In media systems theory, the Nordic countries are often held to constitute a specific media system (Brüggemann et al., 2014). In this article, we put this claim to the test in the area of news consumption. Based on findings about the four Nordic countries Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland in the annual Reuters Institute Digital News Report (Newman et al., 2019), and inspired by previous studies of the audience dimension of media systems (Hölig et al., 2016; Peruško et al., 2015; Van Damme et al., 2017), we undertake a descriptive empirical analysis of the 2019 data of this 38-country study. Our study compares news audience practices in the Nordic countries with those of countries belonging to other supranational media systems. We find that while there are some internal differences within the Nordic media system, there are salient news consumption commonalities that are specific to the Nordic countries, such as preferred sources of news, pathways to news, paying for online news, and trust in the news.
In this article, we develop the concept of small acts of engagement (SAOE) in a networked media environment as a conceptual framework to study specific audience practices and as an agenda for research on these practices. We define SAOE, such as liking, sharing, and commenting, as productive audience practices that require little investment and are intentionally more casual than the structural and laborious practices examined as types of produsage and convergence culture. We further elaborate on the interpretive and productive aspects of SAOE, which allow us to reconnect the notions of a participatory culture and a culture of everyday agency. Our central argument is that audience studies’ perspective allows viewing SAOE as practices of everyday audience agency, which, on an aggregate level, have the potential to become powerful acts of resistance.
Although the notion of measuring the performance of news stories is not a new phenomenon, the advent of online analytic tools has redefined the whole terrain of the sociology of online news production and distribution. This paper, which draws from an on-going cross-national comparative study of Zimbabwean, Kenyan, and South African newsrooms, focuses on the use and role of analytics in news production and distribution. It investigates how analytics tools are used in editorial decision-making and advertising negotiations. Based on structured and unstructured interviews with editors and journalists working for selected newsrooms in East and Southern Africa, the paper examines how the use of analytics is reshaping the evaluation of the impact, reach, relevance of news stories and performance of individual journalists. Our study shows that the deployment of analytic tools has altered how news organizations in different parts of Africa monitor, track, engage in digital listening and interact with their audiences, thereby spawning a new phenomenon we call “analytics-driven journalism.” The paper argues that newsrooms in different parts of the continent are, to varied degrees, now more concerned about newsroom metrics and engagement rates at the expense of the broader public interest dimension of journalism.
Looking at web analytics in newsrooms, journalism studies scholarship has explored the notion of success in using web analytics and metrics in measuring journalist-audience engagement. Scholars have looked at the role of organizational structures, cognition, and emotion in defining success with analytics. This article analyzes how journalists interpret journalist-audience engagement success using web analytics and what this reliance on web analytics might mean for contemporary news production. Using direct observation of newsrooms and interviews with news media workers, this article argues that media workers interpret success in audience engagement using web analytics as a process of cultural matching between web analytics companies, media workers, and audiences. This article shows that analytics in journalism have highlighted some of the shared values and practices across the matchers and revealed the challenges of measuring success in audience-journalist engagement.
In a fragmented digital media environment where news is increasingly encountered passively in social media feeds and via automated mobile alerts, active avoidance of news, rather than deliberate consumption, takes on outsized importance in shaping what it means to be an informed citizen. This article systematically evaluates the factors that predict news avoidance behaviors, considering both individual- and country-level explanations. Using a large-scale quantitative, comparative approach, we examine more than 67,000 survey respondents across 35 countries worldwide and find consistent evidence for how factors including demographics, political attitudes, and news genre preferences shape avoidance consistently across information environments. But we also show how country-level contextual factors, what we call “cultures of news consumption,” influence behaviors beyond that which is explained by respondent-level differences. Specifically, levels of press freedom and political freedom and stability are shown to negatively predict rates of news avoidance. These findings suggest that many people’s news use practices depend not only on personal characteristics and preferences but quite sensibly on the news available to them, which they may have good reason to view as deficient or untrustworthy, as well as culturally specific norms around its value and utility.
Audience analytics and metrics are ubiquitous in today’s media environment. However, little is known about how creative media workers come to understand the social norms related to those technologies. Drawing on social influence theory, this study examines formal and informal socialization mechanisms in U.S. newsrooms. It finds that editorial newsworkers express receiving a moderate amount of training on the use of analytics and metrics, which is typically provided by their organization; primarily look to people within the organization, and especially superiors, to understand the social norms; learn about those norms mostly through observation and communication about others’ experiences with the technology rather than their own; and that experiences are influenced by the organizational context and the individual’s position in the editorial hierarchy. This leads to a broader intervention to our understanding of the social structures and individual dispositions that influence how emerging technologies are experienced across organizational and institutional environments.
Using the Nordic media model as an empirical backdrop, Journalism Between the State and the Market defines and analyzes journalism’s fundamental problem: its shifting location between the state and the market.
This book examines how this distance is decreasing as journalism steps closer to both the market (algorithmically monetizing audiences) and the state (lobbying governments for subsidies and attacking public service broadcasting). The book analyzes journalism’s negotiated position between the market and the state in the age of disruptions, offering a theoretical foundation that seeks to account for the structural conditions of journalism in the digital age.
For scholars, graduates and students in journalism, news sociology and media and communication studies, Journalism Between the State and the Market provides a theoretical perspective that can be used as a valuable tool when studying and observing the current developments in journalism.