Which Factors Impact Engagement on News Articles on Facebook?

TL;DR

This study investigates how factors like timing, format, and delay influence engagement metrics on Facebook news articles, using a custom news-aggregator to control for confounding variables.

Contribution

The paper introduces a news-aggregator tool to isolate effects of post timing and format on engagement, controlling for news-event and publisher.

Findings

Post format impacts engagement levels.

Timing of posts influences reaction volume.

Delay between event and post affects engagement.

Abstract

Social media is increasingly being used as a news-platform. To reach their intended audience, newspapers need for their articles to be well ranked by Facebook's news-feed algorithm. The number of likes, shares and other reactions determine the lead scoring criteria. This paper will try to assess how the reaction volume is impacted by the following criteria: (1) Delay between event and post release; (2) Time of the day the post is published; and (3) Post format: video, photo or text. To isolate the effect of the publication time and post format on a post, we need to control for the news-event and the publishing newspaper. For that end, a news-aggregator is designed and implemented, to group together posts that relate to the same news-event. This tool gave some spin-off results, allowing the ability to map newspapers by similarity and to detect some topic omissions.