News reports on TV, twitter and the active audience

Abstract

Twitter has established itself as one of the most influential social networks. This article performs a content analysis on the five Twitter profiles of the five news programs broadcast by general-interest TV networks in Spain according to the audience ranking provided by Kantar Media. We have defined variables that include the description of the news profiles, type of post, frequency, response and user interaction, analysing the capacity of news programs to use Twitter to disseminate content and generate conversation, their acquired reputation, and user quality.