Social media posts with videos attract more followers as per a study presented by Mansour Al Ameri, a PhD student at the United Arab Emirates University (UAEU).
Social media posts with videos attract more followers, likes and interaction than those with images, as per a study presented by Mansour Al Ameri, a 31-year-old PhD student at the United Arab Emirates University (UAEU). He presented the research paper titled: Factors influencing User Engagement in Instagram News Producers Accounts: A case in the UAE at the International Association of Mass Communication Research (IAMCR) conference that was held at the University of Oregon last month, as reported by the Saudi Gazette.
Al Ameri, who is currently studying mass communication, was initially struck by the dominance of non-official news outlets on social media, compared to traditional UAE-based newspapers such as Al Bayan, Al Khaleej and Al Ittihad. Informal social media accounts have attracted more readers looking for news, he found.
This led the PhD student to study the emerging social media phenomenon and its impact on official news outlets in the UAE, the Saudi Gazette reported.
His findings revealed that the more posts an account has, the more it attracts followers per day on Instagram. Instagram users are more attracted to soft news while hard news can be modified and crafted to become soft news to attract a larger audience. There is also a positive correlation between comments, likes and views, he found.
The report quoted Al Ameri saying: News articles dont come from official newspapers but from non-professional social media accounts, he said. Its very interesting to me why they are dominant in social media. The main exposure of news is from these three outlets, which are UAE Barq, NetAD and 3meed_news.
The theme of his research was reportedly looking into ways in which audiences are influenced. Nowadays, its very interesting to see how media shapes the world and how the representation of current events, whatever they may be, is shaped by media, so its an area I cannot ignore, he said. I presented my paper and the major findings of the research by analysing these three non-official accounts, because they are manned by non-professional journalists who are very familiar with social media features.”
I want to investigate further and come up with a strategy as to how we can adapt to any social media platform, Al Ameri added. Instagram in the UAE is gaining popularity now for news outlets but somehow I want to find a common factor that can suit every social media platform so that, whatever comes up, there is a rule of thumb for how news officials can incorporate or employ these factors to gain popularity.
