Top newspapers use social media to spread news rather than engage audiences
A recent study by Drs Mark Badham and Markus Mykkänen from the University of ⱹää examined social media engagement strategies by prominent newspapers such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal in the USA, The Sydney Morning Herald in Australia, and Metro in the UK.
“We found that the most read newspapers are frequently distributing news content among their audiences via their social media sites, but they are not engaging with them very much,” says senior lecturer Mark Badham from the ⱹää University School of Business and Economics.
“Despite audience engagement becoming a key performance indicator of journalistic production, the newspapers in this study do not employ many engagement strategies in their Facebook and Twitter accounts,” he said.
Although audiences increasingly turn to social media as their main source of news and subsequently consume, share, and discuss news through social media, these popular newspapers mainly employ a one-way information dissemination strategy on Facebook and Twitter. Interactional engagement strategies play only a supporting role in their cultivation of relationships with their audiences.
The newspapers in this study are stuck in the old news dissemination mindset (i.e., publication of news), even though social media presents opportunities for more two‐way communication between newspapers and audiences. This suggests newspaper management and journalists are satisfied with a social media communication model in which they constantly distribute news headlines via their social media sites and rely on their audiences to pass on this news to their social networks, thus contributing to audience consumption and news marketing targets.
“Newspapers’ lack of engagement with audiences in social media limits the ability of audience members to enhance a story’s prominence and thus draw attention to it,” says postdoctoral researcher Markus Mykkänen from the Department of Language and Communication Studies of University of ⱹää.
Newspapers specialize in the constant dissemination of social, economic, and political information to their audiences. Although a dissemination‐first mindset traditionally and predominantly takes place in their proprietary news sites, it seems this practice carries over into social media sites as well. This shows that newspapers do not take audience engagement seriously. Audience engagement would lead to mutually beneficial relations between newspapers and their audiences.
Bibliographic information:
Mark Badham and Markus Mykkänen: A Relational Approach to How Media Engage with their Audiences in SocialMedia in Media & Communication, Vol 10, No 1 (2022). This article is part of the issue New Forms of Media Work and its Organizational and Institutional Conditions.
DOI:
Further information:
Mark Badham, Corporate Communication, ⱹää University School of Business & Economics, mabadham@jyu.fi, 040 682 1485
Markus Mykkänen, Journalism, Department of Language and Communication Studies, University of ⱹää, markus.mykkanen@jyu.fi, 050 353 6669