Over the past decade social media has grown bigger and bigger. Nowadays
people often receive news via Facebook and/or Twitter. And companies and media
outlets make great use of this. These organizations post their information on
social media for their followers to read. But what they love even more is that
some of their followers share or retweet their messages. Because the more
people share it, the more people are likely to read it. And a lot of people are
active on social media. Nowadays, there are over 300 million monthly active Twitter users worldwide, and over 2 billion (2000
million!) monthly active Facebook users worldwide. 
Bente Kalsnes and Anders Olof Larsson, two researchers from Norway
researched the news sharing across social media. They wanted to know what type
of messages are shared on social media. In their research they only focused on Twitter
and Facebook.
Results showed that more stories were shared on Facebook than on
Twitter. This makes sense given that more people are active on Facebook than on
Twitter. With regards to Facebook, the topics of the most shared stories are: social
issues, science and technology and crime. And for Twitter, the topics of the
most shared stories are: social issues, sports, politics and culture. This means
that there is a difference in the topics of the most shared stories on these two
different social media.
In previous research on email
sharing, stories that created strong emotions were shared more often. They were
distributed more because they made people happy or angry. Stories that did not
create these strong emotions were less distributed. The same thing can be said about news sharing
on social media. The most shared news stories were emotional stories, and
strong and provocative comment articles.
Another difference between Twitter
and Facebook was that the news stories that were shared on Twitter often
consisted ‘hard’ news, this means they reported on foreign policy or
immigration. Whereas the news stories that were shared on Facebook consisted of
‘softness’, which means that they reported issues pertaining children, health
and education. This distinction can be explained by both the difference in
users as well as the difference in how the media outlet is used. Twitter often consists
of ‘hard’ news, as previously mentioned, which relates to the fact that hard
news is typically associated with urgent events, for which Twitter is more
suited than Facebook. This distinction
is also enhanced by the difference in social media user. Twitter has been said
to be associated with more high class or elite groups of society while Facebook
is more used by regular people. This distinction between classes helps explain
why there is a difference in news type on each social media. Because these different
classes have different news interests.
Besides these characteristics of social
media sharing, it is also important to know that news outlets use these
characteristics to choose the news they are willing to share. Thus, what is
shared online by the consumers, has an impact on what is selected by journalists
and editors. This means that the information just provided in this blog can be
very well used in news sharing on social media as well as in press releases that
are send to the news organizations.
For the full article by Bente Kalsnes and
Anders Olof Larsson please click here.
Ilse Weergang is na het behalen van een BA
Muziekwetenschappen, nu een master studente Entertainment Communication aan de
Universiteit van Amsterdam. Naast studeren is zij het liefst met muziek bezig.
Ze speelt dwarsfluit in het Alkmaars harmonieorkest en in enkele ensembles.
Daarnaast houdt ze erg van reizen en de natuur.
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