What Determines a Journalist’s Popularity on Twitter?

Abstract

Popularity on social media has become more important for journalists as news organisations increasingly encourage their journalists to develop online personas which are popular with audiences. However, outlets’ social media guidelines have also narrowed journalists’ scope for action to do so, particularly in what they can post. Using a quantitative analysis of Twitter data and profiles of 300 UK journalists, this study asks if the strategic use of low-level forms of behaviour as well as journalists’ professional self-presentation on social media offer “a way out”. It finds that a “golden formula” to increase popularity on Twitter through these means does not exist and suggests that journalists’ popularity on Twitter is largely beyond their immediate control, raising important questions about the significance and use of popularity metrics on social media as benchmarks in news organisations.

KEYWORDS:

• Journalism
• journalists
• self-presentation
• social media
• popularity
• Twitter

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author would like to thank Graham McNeill, Jonathan Bright and Ralph Schroeder from the Oxford Internet Institute. Furthermore, he would like to thank Caroline Lees, Annika Sehl, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen and Sílvia Majó-Vázquez from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism as well as David Sutcliffe, Sophie G. Einwächter, Edward Percarpio, Florian Dahlhausen, Katie Draper and particularly Michelle Disser for helpful feedback and for reading drafts of this paper. Finally, the author would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful suggestions and constructive feedback.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The journalists were drawn from the sample of political journalists used in this study.

Additional information

Funding

The research in this article was supported through a Domus Grant of Balliol College, University of Oxford.