Love, Like or Angry in Times of COVID-19? Analysing News Brands’ Audience Engagement on Facebook Amidst a Pandemic-Reference-Cited by-同舟云学术

Love, Like or Angry in Times of COVID-19? Analysing News Brands’ Audience Engagement on Facebook Amidst a Pandemic

Published:2023-09-05 Issue:3 Volume:4 Page:931-945
ISSN:2673-5172
Container-title:Journalism and Media
language:en
Short-container-title:Journalism and Media

Author:

Hendrickx Jonathan¹^ORCID,Van Remoortere Annelien²,Opgenhaffen Michaël³

Affiliation:

1. Department of Communication, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Vienna, 1010 Vienna, Austria

2. Department of Social Sciences, Wageningen University, 6700 HB Wageningen, The Netherlands

3. Institute for Media Studies, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, 3000 Leuven, Belgium

Abstract

As an integral part of their online strategies and business models, news outlets diffuse their online content on social media platforms such as Facebook to increase traffic. They thereby succumb to the contingencies and constraints of third platforms infamous for their sudden changes in algorithms. In this article, we assess engagement patterns of 140,359 Facebook posts of 17 Belgian news brands between March 2020 and 2021. We map out differences in audience engagement of news outlets’ Facebook posts related and unrelated to the COVID-19 pandemic and differences between mainstream and alternative news outlets. We find that COVID-19-related posts generate more engagement and more so for mainstream media than for alternative media outlets.

Publisher

MDPI AG

Subject

Medical Assisting and Transcription,Medical Terminology

Link

https://www.mdpi.com/2673-5172/4/3/60/pdf

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