https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6060-6686
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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.
Notes
1. In identifying active accounts, two criteria were considered: recency of activities by news organizations and the number of notes on the posts appearing on the main page. Although news organizations tend to have multiple Tumblr accounts (often associated with themes such as newsroom behind the scenes, data visualizations, and different programming and editors/hosts), mostly one or two accounts stood out in terms of how active they were.
2. Among the 41 news organizations, Buzzfeed, Elite Daily, Fortune Magazine, NBC News, NY Post, Slate in Brief, the Atlantic, and Vox were excluded in analysis 2, either because they made no Tumblr posts or they were yet to create a Tumblr account in January 2015. Also, data on ABC News and Yahoo News were merged, since both accounts belonged to one news entity, Yahoo-ABC News Network (Pew, Citation2015). Likewise, data on Post Graphics and Washington Post were merged, because both accounts belonged to Washingtonpost.com.