Exploring the Relationship Between Stylistic Features and Reactions on Facebook A Comparative Analysis of Newspaper Headlines and Status Messages

Social media platforms have become omnipresent over the last fifteen years and have forced news outlets to repackage the distribution of their content, custom-tailoring their news in accordance with the platform-specific social media logic. How news consumers engage with news outlets' content has also become more complex and more granular, as they can now express emotions that go beyond the 'like-button' by 'loving' or 'caring' about specific content. In this study, we link Facebook reactions to the specific features of headlines by conducting a content analysis of 3,163 news articles published by five Belgian news brands on Facebook. Results have revealed that more negative sentiment of the headline elicits more Facebook 'Sad', 'Wow', and 'Angry' Reactions, whereas a more positive sentiment leads to more 'Love' Reactions. With respect to topics and genres, this study found that ‘softer’ topic categories dealing with Lifestyle, Media and Entertainment, Environment induce much more positive user reactions such as ‘Love’ and ‘Wow’. However, for the topic Politics, we found that more ‘Haha’ and ‘Angry’ Reactions were prominent. In doing so, this study has examined Facebook Reactions’ functionality as a potential proxy of emotional engagement with specific headlines in the online news environment.