How to engage the audience? A study on using Twitter to engage newspaper readers

Abstract

The proliferation of media outlets and audience fragmentation imply media companies have to use all available tools to reach and hopefully engage their audiences. The widespread use of social networks is seen by many media companies as a way to promote their brands and ultimately establish a link to the people in the audience. Nevertheless, there is still a lot experimenting on the right way to approach social networks users to engage them beyond what traditional advertising can do to promote a media brand and its extensions. Therefore, this chapter will explore the concept of engagement in order to determine whether a social network-i.e. Twitter-is useful for this purpose. A user is engaged if she participates in a conversation with the journalists at the media outlet, make comments about the content distributed via the social network, and help diffuse the media content to other users. Furthermore, this study will assess if different tactics employed by the media outlet can increase engagement. The findings are valuable to better understand the concept of engagement when applied to the social networks. Also, the results are helpful for managers who need to use social networks to improve the relation between the media brand and its audience.