News sharing on Facebook: Which factors trigger opinion leaders to share news articles?

The news industry is facing a problem, social media is driving traffic to news sites, which decreases the advertising revenues of the news companies, who operate these sites because visitors spend less time on their site. Simultaneously, it became evident after the emergence of online news platforms, that readers spend less time reading stories about politics, public affairs or local news and more time on 'soft' news about business, entertainment or crime. There the paradox stands. From the societal point of view it is important that such topics get high quality coverage. Meanwhile, stories about public affairs or politics are not so financially beneficial for media to cover in comparison with soft news. Sales and subscription revenues exceeded the revenue derived from advertising for news companies the first time in this century in 2014. Therefore, the financial incentive shifted from the satisfaction of advertisers' needs to the satisfaction of readers' needs. As Facebook is the most prominent social media channel for sharing news products, this paper concentrated on the following research question: which factors of a news product trigger opinion leaders to share news articles on Facebook? The focus of this study was opinion leaders, as they are able to access much of the society through their suggestions on social media. This paper investigated the problem qualitatively by conducting twelve in-depth interviews among the opinion leaders of Estonian public sphere and proposing grounded theory on the basis of their claims. In order to provide real world context and examples as they were enacted by participants, a document analysis was conducted, which included the analysis of 161 sharing actions of the interviewees. The constant comparative method was utilized throughout and document analysis allowed for triangulation between the words and actions of participants in order to provide reliable results. The results of this study must be be interpreted in the context of Estonian news industry and Estonian society. However, similar societies may find similar patterns. There are two main conclusions of this study. First, opinion leaders will assess the news products based on the perception of proximity, perception of quality, perception of irritation and perception of novelty. Second, although entertaining content and stories about crime, sports and business are popular for the audience as a whole, opinion leaders tend to share stories about politics or public affairs, which have high level of abstraction, are convenient to follow and include important information for the peers in their social media network. In addition, the practical implications for news organizations in terms of marketing and public service are discussed.