The Press Stopped Posting on Facebook. Evolution of the Positioning of Spanish Newspapers on Facebook from 2014 to 2023
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5294/pacla.2024.27.4.6Keywords:
Facebook, newspapers, news, social media, journalismAbstract
The social media platform Facebook turned twenty in 2024 and currently has three billion monthly users. From the beginning, the press relied on this platform to publish its news content, achieving a high engagement rate and significant website traffic from Facebook. This research aims to study the positioning that the Spanish press (El País, El Mundo, ABC, La Vanguardia, El Español, elDiaro.es, El HuffPost, and 20 Minutos) is developing on this platform to confirm mainly whether there have been variations in this period and what their short- and long-term strategies could be as a result of the latest events that have impacted this platform. This research will adopt a mixed approach. In the first phase, we will quantitatively analyse the evolution of the acquisition of followers, the number of posts, and audience interactions over 10 years, from 1 January 2014 to December 2023, with a sample of N = 1,579,267 posts. The second part analyses qualitative data collected through interviews with the selected media managers. This research concludes by confirming that most of the newspapers in this sample are changing their strategy on this platform, mainly due to the difficulty of acquiring new users and the decrease in the engagement rate of their community.
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