Social networks and applications have been at the center of our lives for a long time. Applications such as Twitter and Instagram dominate the mobile screen usage reports we receive on a weekly basis. So much so that we read these applications just before going to sleep, and open these applications when we first wake up.
There are various answers to the question “Why do we use social networks?”. One of these is the desire to keep up with the agenda. According to the 2021 Digital News Report by Reuters Institute, 40% of us, as Turkish citizens, use YouTube in order to follow and share news while 34%, 34%, and 30% of us use Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook & WhatsApp respectively. So, what do journalists do on these media channels? How do they share their news? What reaction does their news receive? What is journalists’ reach? And how are production and presentation patterns of news in social media shaped?
This research, in the context of the questions above, focuses on the use practices of social networks by prominent journalists on Twitter and Instagram as of September 21st, 2021. The aim of the research is to understand whether these journalists make use of special methods in the way they use social media as well as to explore the differences regarding the content, form, and target audience of the posts between different networks, if the journalist is both active and popular in more than one social network. In order to achieve this, comprehensive research was conducted to examine the way 50 of the most followed journalists use their Twitter and Instagram accounts (the most followed 50 actors in the both channels were examined).
The highlights from the research are as follows;