Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

6-2019

Abstract

We evaluate the effects of the topics of social media posts on audiences across five social media platforms (i.e., Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit) at four levels of user engagement. We collected 3,163,373 social posts from 53 news organizations across five platforms during an 8month period. We analyzed the differences in news organization platform strategies by focusing on topic variations by organization and the corresponding effect on user engagement at four levels. Findings show that topic distribution varies by platform, although there are some topics that are popular across most platforms. User engagement levels vary both by topics and platforms. Finally, we show that one can predict if an article will be publicly shared to another platform by individuals with precision of approximately 80%. This research has implications for news organizations desiring to increase and to prioritize types of user engagement.

Keywords

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, YouTube, Platform strategy, Social media, Social media platforms, Topic distributions, User engagement

Discipline

Databases and Information Systems | Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing | Social Media

Research Areas

Data Science and Engineering

Publication

Proceedings of the 13th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media ICWSM 2019: Munich, June 11-14

Volume

13

First Page

47

Last Page

57

Publisher

AAAI Press

City or Country

Palo Alto, CA

Additional URL

https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/ICWSM/article/view/3208

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