Are Social Media Worth It for News Media?: Explaining News Engagement on Tumblr and Digital Traffic of News Websites

IF 0.8 Q3 COMMUNICATION
Dam Hee Kim, Meera Desai
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引用次数: 2

Abstract

ABSTRACT News organizations, faced with financial challenges in transitioning to a digital era, have embraced social media to attract an audience. Little, however, is empirically known regarding which factors generate engagement on social media to drive traffic to dedicated news websites. To answer this question, digital traffic of top 50 news organizations and 230,375 posts made by 41 accounts of these organizations on a social media platform, Tumblr, were analyzed. The results suggest that both still and animated images in news posts can be helpful for engagement not just linearly but in a non-linear, exponential fashion while hashtags in news posts may also positively predict digital traffic to news websites. Nonetheless, having a link to news websites in posts does not increase engagement or digital traffic to news websites. The implications of results are discussed for news organizations’ digital strategies that not only engage but also inform audiences for better journalism.
新闻媒体是否值得使用社交媒体?:解释Tumblr上的新闻参与度和新闻网站的数字流量
新闻机构在向数字时代过渡的过程中面临着财务挑战,因此纷纷利用社交媒体来吸引受众。然而,对于哪些因素会在社交媒体上产生参与度,从而为专门的新闻网站带来流量,我们的经验知之甚少。为了回答这个问题,我们分析了排名前50位的新闻机构的数字流量,以及这些机构的41个账户在社交媒体平台Tumblr上发布的230375条帖子。结果表明,新闻帖子中的静态和动画图像都可以帮助用户参与,不仅是线性的,而且是非线性的,指数方式,而新闻帖子中的话题标签也可以积极预测新闻网站的数字流量。尽管如此,在帖子中加入新闻网站的链接并不会增加新闻网站的参与度或数字流量。研究结果对新闻机构的数字战略的影响进行了讨论,这些战略不仅可以吸引受众,还可以为更好的新闻报道提供信息。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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来源期刊
CiteScore
3.10
自引率
5.30%
发文量
12
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