News companies need to pay special attention to social media users’ ‘limited attention’ when forming their social media strategy, writes Chankyung Pak, of Michigan State University. News companies are using social media to advertise their individual news articles but the competition with other content in social media is hard. The conference paper presents a study that examines how news companies’ link sharing strategies impact diversity of news.

One expected outcome of the study is that news companies choose less controversial news to signal for their unshared news. To examine this hypothesis the author will analyse the text of news articles that are shared and unshared on Twitter by news companies. The data set consists of 121 news websites and all the tweets from their Twitter accounts.

The paper “News Company’s Link Sharing on Twitter as Informative Advertising and Content Signaling”  was presented at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (ACM CHI ’17). It is available online from the ACM Digital Library (open access).

Picture: Twitter by Mambembe Arts & Crafts, licence: CC BY 2.0