Social Media News in Crisis? Popularity Analysis of the Top Nine Facebook Pages of Bangladeshi News Media

Abstract

Social media has become a popular source of information around the world. Previous studies explored different trends of social media news consumption. However, no studies have focused on Bangladesh to date, where social media penetration is very high in recent years. To fill this gap, this research aimed to understand its popularity trends during the period. For that reason, this work analyzes 97.67 million page likes and 3.48 billion interaction data collected from nine Bangladeshi news media's Facebook pages between December 2016 to November 2020. The analysis shows that the growth rates of page likes and interaction rates declined during this period. It suggests that the media's Facebook pages are gradually losing their popularity among Facebook users, which may have two more interpretations: Facebook's aggregate appeal as a news source is decreasing to users, or Bangladeshi media's appeal is eroding to Facebook users. These findings challenge the previous results, i.e., Facebook's demand as a news source is increasing with time. We offer four explanations of the decreased popularity of Facebook's news: information overload, exposure to incidental news, users' selective exposure and different aims of using Facebook, and conflict between media agendas and users' interests. Some theoretical and practical significance of the results has been discussed as well.