Who will land and stay? Page-specific antecedents of news engagement on social media

Abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of page-specific factors such as page language, posting frequency and community size on online engagement in the context of social media pages of news channels in Pakistan.Design/methodology/approachFor this research, official Facebook pages of news channels in Pakistan were defined as the target population. Secondary data were obtained from the Facebook pages of 28 news channels in Pakistan. For the selected period between August and September 2019, a total of 420 cases were obtained and manually entered in SPSS 21 for analysis. Tweedie estimation was run to check the proposed hypotheses.FindingsResults show that English pages are more engaging than Urdu. Additionally, posting frequency and community size have a negative relationship with online engagement.Practical implicationsThe findings of the study suggest that administrators of social media pages of news channels should target English news readers more than Urdu news readers. Additionally, they should manage a low posting frequency so that readers may not get irritated. Administrators should not sponsor their pages to expand community size on a single page. Instead, they may opt to build a separate page for each news category with smaller community size.Originality/valueWhile previous studies have discussed the post-specific factors of engagement, this study has checked the impact of page-specific factors such as page language, posting frequency and community size on online engagement.