What Role Do Social Media Editors Play in the Diffusion of News Links

The first paper session on this last day of Social Media & Society 2018 is Michaël Opgenhaffen, whose interest is in gatekeeping on social media. Gatekeeping is one of the fundamental processes in the news industry: editors and journalists choose what stories end up in the final newspaper, news bulletin, or news Website. But selection processes might now diverge across print and online news publications, and the arrival of social media as a medium for the news further complicates this picture.

On social media, audiences receive deep links to news stories on news Websites; they increasingly bypass the homepage of the news publication. An growing number of users arrive to the online publication via such social media links, and news outlets are still determining the best strategies for attracting audiences to their Websites via social media. This has also become the task for a range of social media editors and social media managers hired by news outlets. Further, of course, news links are also promoted by other stakeholders, from individual journalists to members of the audience.

To what extent, then, is the diffusion of links via social media driven by these social media editors – what impact do they have? The present paper focusses on Facebook, and seeks to assess the proportion of total user engagement with a news item that results from promotion on the news outlet’s own Facebook page. It monitored the Facebook engagement score for news URLs via the platform’s API (which also counts engagement by private accounts), and the news outlets’ Facebook pages in order to determine which stories were promoted here, and when.

Generally, a substantial proportion of engagement is generated after promotion on the Facebook pages. But there are several different patterns: ‘kickstart diffusion’ immediately after the publication of a new news article is distinct from ‘boost diffusion’ by posting on Facebook some time after the initial publication of the news article. In each case, publication on the Facebook page generates significant additional diffusion, but generally remains below 60% of the total reach – so alternative forms of promotion are clearly also important.