How-to Present News on Social Media: A Causal Analysis of Editing News Headlines for Boosting User Engagement

Abstract

To reach a broader audience and optimize traffic toward news articles, media outlets commonly run social media accounts and share their content with a short text summary. Despite its importance of writing a compelling message in sharing articles, the research community does not own a sufficient understanding of what kinds of editing strategies effectively promote audience engagement. In this study, we aim to fill the gap by analyzing media outlets' current practices using a data-driven approach. We first build a parallel corpus of original news articles and their corresponding tweets that eight media outlets shared. Then, we explore how those media edited tweets against original headlines and the effects of such changes. To estimate the effects of editing news headlines for social media sharing in audience engagement, we present a systematic analysis that incorporates a causal inference technique with deep learning; using propensity score matching, it allows for estimating potential (dis-)advantages of an editing style compared to counterfactual cases where a similar news article is shared with a different style. According to the analyses of various editing styles, we report common and differing effects of the styles across the outlets. To understand the effects of various editing styles, media outlets could apply our easy-to-use tool by themselves.

Hitting the Right Notes: Exploring the Relationship between YouTube Music Videos and Digital User Engagement

“…OTR has been widely used in various fields, including tourism, hospitality, and health, to understand customer opinions and improve their services (Borghouts et al, 2021;Chen et al, 2020). Similarly, Tufekci (2014) and Park et al (2021) found that social media platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook, have become vital channels for OTR, enabling users to express their opinions and experiences about various products and services.…”

“We Rewrote This Title”: How News Headlines Are Remediated on Facebook and How This Affects Engagement

“…Janét et al (2022) showed that different headline formats (such as question-based and forward-referencing headlines) make little difference in terms of engagement, and mainly affect the perception of the headline. The computational study by Park et al (2020) of news headlines on Twitter showed that adjustments to the headlines for some news accounts boosted engagement in terms of likes, retweets, and replies, but caused a drop in engagement for other news media. What was also clear from this study is that it is easier to give a like than a retweet or reply on Twitter, which is similar to the behavior of Facebook and Instagram users, for example, who are much more likely to give a like than share the post or post a reply (Alhabash et al, 2019).…”

Reading Hoax: Measuring Students’ Critical News Literacy

“…With the advent of digital news platforms, social media has become an immediate and significant factor in news dissemination. This increased influence of news media means that users can contribute to its development and feel more connected to the news (Kurnia et al, 2023;Park et al, 2021;Sveningsson, 2015).…”