The challenges of creating engaging content: Results from a focus group study of a popular news media organization

The process of content creation for distribution via social media platforms is not a trivial one for social media editors as the goal of creating both serious and engaging content is challenging, with no clear or differing guidelines or rules across and between platforms. For creators of serious content, such as news organizations, advertisers, or educational institutions, engagement has a deeper meaning beyond likes, shares, etc. that is aimed at the audience actually processing the underlying content associated with a social media post. In this research, we report findings from a group study that aimed to understand the process and challenges of creating engaging content across three social media platforms in a major news organization. The findings from the study indicate that creating engaging content is effort- and time-consuming, and they highlight the need to support the process of creating engaging content across multiple social media platforms. Our longer-term goal is to develop a system design to support social media editors' creation of engaging content with which they can select engaging passages from news articles and select platforms on which to publish the content.