Engagement strategies of influential journalists on Twitter Ecuador

Abstract

This article presents the results of a study that evaluated Twitter engagement strategies from the 20 most influential journalists in Ecuador. This study has a quantitative approach. It analyzes 6626 interactions occurred during a month on their official Twitter profiles in order to analyze engagement strategies used by the most influential journalists. Each tweet was coded attending any of the four categories: content curation, positioning, personalization and specialization. The coding was conducted by a researcher and then it was verified by random checks from three more coders. The most commonly used strategy by journalists was content curation; news specifically written and published in the timeline of the journalist or taken from their media company, followed by content recommendation from non-media actors, and lastly content recommendation from journalists of a different media company. The second most frequent personalization strategy was retweeting, while the most absent was personal content or direct dialogue with the audience by mentioning or directly tweeting them. Thirdly, the positioning strategy appears to be focused mainly on taking sides or supporting individuals and groups in certain causes. The taking sides strategy generated more comments from the audience. Finally, there are few actions that can be considered in the category of specialization, no evidence of publications related to investigative journalism and journalism data were found. Actions were registered to contextualize the information. A fifth emergent engagement strategy consisted in tweeting self-help phrases and motivational posts.