Worth to Share? How Content Characteristics and Article Competitiveness Influence News Sharing on Social Network Sites

Abstract

We investigated how sharing performance on Facebook and Twitter is influenced both by news articles’ content characteristics and the availability of additional news articles reporting on the same news topic. We conducted a multi-method study, integrating automated data collection and manual/automated content analyses of 1,764 German online news articles. Our findings show the influence of news factors and, more importantly, news outlets on sharing performance, while simultaneously highlighting differences between the logics of news sharing on Facebook and Twitter. We also find that the first article reporting on a news event is shared more often than subsequent articles.