Limited corporate influence on social media news: Evidence from topic-level agenda building and newsworthiness

In today’s digital societies, corporate and news organizations both communicate actively on social media, raising questions about whether corporate public relations efforts and agendas influence the news agenda in a social media context. Drawing on agenda-building and news value frameworks, this study investigates the role of newsworthiness in organizational agenda building on social media. Using transformer-based topic modeling and large language model-assisted classification, we examined 199,273 tweets from 295 U.S. corporations and 16 U.S. news outlets in 2021. The findings indicate that corporations are generally ineffective agenda builders on social media. In fact, corporate attention to topics is associated with decreased attention from news organizations to the same topics the following day. In contrast, newsworthiness strongly predicts news attention, independent of corporate activity. Topics characterized by scope, controversy, or negative consequences are especially likely to attract coverage from news organizations. Once newsworthiness is accounted for, corporate attention no longer has a meaningful influence on news agendas. This study investigates newsworthiness in agenda building at a topic level and highlights the enduring power of news values in shaping coverage, even in fast-paced, digital media environments.