Exploring the Relationship Between Stylistic Features and Reactions on Facebook: A Comparative Analysis of Newspaper Headlines and Status Messages

Social media platforms have become omnipresent over the last fifteen years and have forced news outlets to repackage the distribution of their content, custom-tailoring their news in accordance with the platform-specific social media logic. How news consumers engage with news outlets' content has also become more complex and more granular, as they can now express emotions that go beyond the "like-button" by "loving" or "caring" about specific (news) content. In this study, we link these Facebook Reactions to the specific features of headlines by conducting a content analysis of 3,163 news articles published by five Flemish news brands on Facebook. Results have revealed that status messages contain more emotional stylistic features as compared to Facebook headlines. Secondly, headlines and status messages comprising these emotional features were more likely to generate affective responses (as expressed in the emoji they use, "love", "haha", "wow", "angry" and "sad"). In doing so, this study has examined Facebook Reactions' functionality as a potential proxy of emotional engagement with specific headlines in the online news environment.