Social Media Use by News Outlets from the UAE

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Khayrat Ayyad, whose interest is in how media institutions in the UAE engage with their audiences via social media. The UAE is a global leader in the adoption of digital technologies, and there are a number of state-sponsored or -subsidised media outlets across the UAE’s emirates, alongside for-profit media organisations.

So how do such media engage with their audiences using social media? What tools do they use to enhance interactivity, and how do audiences respond to this? The present project conducted a content analysis of the social media accounts of three newspapers and three media corporations across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter over three weeks in November 2022 to January 2023; this amounted to some 6,300 posts in total.

Information related mostly to official government and corporate activities; posts largely contained summaries and simply linked to news articles. Twitter was mainly used for official government topics, Instagram for corporate topics, and Facebook for services topics. Most organisations rarely used community hashtags, preferring corporate hashtags instead. Predominant post types were photos, text, and photos with text (all 14-16%), with media posts especially prominent on Instagram, unsurprisingly.

Interactions consisted predominantly of likes (50%), with comments lagging far behind (7%); it occurred mainly on Facebook (56%), followed by Instagram (35%) and Twitter (9%). This might indicate a reluctance to engage in open public debate in spite of the ready availability of digital communications technologies, possibly out of concern about professional or social consequences.

Overall, this shows that outlets largely just seek to drive users to their Websites, without any attempts to foster greater engagement or build long-term relations with audiences. There is a need to create more variety in posting styles and content, and to treat social media accounts as alternative and novel platforms or engaging with audiences.