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In order to reach its audiences, journalism regularly turns to social media to promote its articles. This study sets out to ascertain competing communicative logics of Facebook posts as opposed to article teasers on news outlets’ websites. We look at Scandinavian news outlets as a most-similar three-country case with at least a third of all news consumers regularly using Facebook for news. The study builds on an extensive data collection of all Scandinavian news outlets’ Facebook posts including their respective websites’ article teasers over the course of 11 months. We investigate the use of news text grammar (e.g., punctuation or the use of pronouns) and social media features (e.g., hashtags or the use of emojis) alongside structural influences from individual countries, outlet reach, and ownership. Findings show Facebook posts to include less punctuation while employing more calls to action through the use of question and exclamation marks. We conclude with a reinvigorated call for hierarchical considerations when investigating news outlets’ social media endeavours through editors’ experiences, available resources to a news outlet, and institutional willingness to align with audiences.
Haim et al. (Wed,) studied this question.