You Should Read This Study! It Investigates Scandinavian Social Media Logics ☝

Abstract

In order to reach its audiences, journalism regularly turns to social media to promote its articles. This study sets out to ascertain competing communicative logics of Facebook posts as opposed to article teasers on news outlets’ websites. We look at Scandinavian news outlets as a most-similar three-country case with at least a third of all news consumers regularly using Facebook for news. The study builds on an extensive data collection of all Scandinavian news outlets’ Facebook posts including their respective websites’ article teasers over the course of 11 months. We investigate the use of news text grammar (e.g., punctuation or the use of pronouns) and social media features (e.g., hashtags or the use of emojis) alongside structural influences from individual countries, outlet reach, and ownership. Findings show Facebook posts to include less punctuation while employing more calls to action through the use of question and exclamation marks. We conclude with a reinvigorated call for hierarchical considerations when investigating news outlets’ social media endeavours through editors’ experiences, available resources to a news outlet, and institutional willingness to align with audiences.

Keywords:

• Facebook
• social media
• news
• journalism
• communicative logics
• Denmark
• Norway
• Sweden

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers as well as Marco Bachl for his thoughts on the multilevel analyses. This work is supported by the Ander Foundation, Anne-Marie och Gustav Anders stiftelse för mediaforskning.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Exceptionally, Danish ‘DEN KORTE AVIS’ was also included, which received press support at the time of data collection without expressly adhering to the press council.

2 Pronouns used included all forms of personal (subject and object form), possessive, and reflexive pronouns for Danish (jeg, mig, min, mit, mine, du, dig, dit, dine, han, ham, hans, hun, hende, hendes, den, dens, dets, vi, os, vor, vort, vore, vores, dem, deres, de, dem, sin, sit, sine, hinanden, den, denne, det, dette, de, I, jeres, denne dette, disse), Norwegian (jeg, meg, min, mi, mitt, mine, du, deg, in, di, ditt, dine, han, ham, hans, hun, henne, hennes, den seg, dens, dets, vi, oss, vår, vårt, våre, våres, dere, deres, de, dem, seg, sin sitt, sine, hverandre, den, denne, det, dette, de, disse, hen, hens), and Swedish (jag, mig, du, dig,han, honom, hans, hon, henne, hennes, den, dess, det, dess, vi, oss, ni, er, de, dem, deras, min, mitt, mina, din, ditt, dina, sin, sitt, sina vår, våran, vårt, vårat, våra, eran, ert, erat, dom, hen, hens, denne, detta, dessa).