News Feeds: How News is Communicated on Different Social Media Platforms

“Half of U.S. adults get news at least sometimes from social media” (Pew Research Center). The rise of social media in today's world has contributed to an increasing amount of people viewing news and important information through these sites. While social media may not be everyone’s primary source for national, international, and even local news, social media has come to be many young people's source to share opinions on recent news and bring awareness to important topics in the world.  However, different social sites go about this in different ways. Today, I will be comparing the communication of news on two of the most popular social media platforms, Twitter and Instagram.

First up is twitter. Despite not using twitter often, I’ve had my fair share of encounters with news on the platform. The first thing I noticed about twitter was the format of most news posts. On twitter, most of the content you see comes from well established news sources, and it seems many of those news sources format their posts as a summarized version of what you would see on their broadcasting channel. They tend to feature a short one line title that gives a sort of overview of the news in question, a singular picture sometimes two which provide context to the sentence, and a link to a larger news article, typically from their website. For example, take a look at these two twitter posts from CNN and Fox News. Both posts contain a sentence long summary of the news story, a photograph and an embedded link within the photograph.

In contrast to twitter, most news on Instagram is delivered through infographic slide shows which maximize share-ability and are often “aesthetically pleasing.” Pages such as @chnge, @mattxiv and @impact are some of the biggest users of this format. They typically display a big headline on a solid or gradient background with alternating photo and text slides. For example, this post by @impact or this post from @mattxiv.

Ultimately, the rhetorical choices used on Instagram and Twitter vary slightly but are also extremely similar. They both establish credibility through large followings and create easy to understand posts to appeal to large demographics.

[4 images, 1 quotation, 5 links, 371 words]