Social Media Metrics in the Digital Marketplace of Attention: Does Journalistic Capital Matter for Social Media Capital?

Drawing on Bourdieu’s field theory, this study investigated how the quality and reputation of news outlets were related to their social media capital. Social media capital is conceptualized as the resources that news organizations can generate via social media efforts, and measured by examining each outlet’s audience size and engagement metrics on Twitter. To triangulate findings, we used social media metrics extracted from (1) the entire population of Twitter users, as well as (2) a representative sample of U.S. Twitter users whose demographics were identified through a survey. Our results suggest that journalistic reputation is a reliable predictor of a news outlet’s social media capital. News site quality, however, was not significantly associated with social media metrics. In fact, the quality of news sites was at times related negatively to social media capital, such that, controlling for other factors, news from low-quality sites received more retweets than news from high-quality sites. This pattern was especially pronounced among politically conservative users.