Journal Article: ‘The Effects of Social Media Content Created by Human Brands on Engagement: Evidence from the Indian General Elections 2014’ - Prof. Seema Gupta
Abstract: Human brands, including celebrities, politicians, musicians, CEOs, are often more influential users of social media than brands. For instance, while Coca Cola has 3.33 million followers on Twitter, Barack Obama has more than 107 million followers on Twitter and Cristiano Ronaldo’s FB page has more than 120 million followers.
Content generated by human brands can be positive or negative in tone. While positive content may be uninteresting and not entice the curiosity of the audience, negative tones may be perceived as more interesting and engaging. At the same time, followers may not want to associate with negative toned content for fear of unintended backlash.
This paper addresses the question – what is the impact of tone of content on engagement? Human brands with a large number of followers will have higher engagement levels than those with a smaller number of followers. Audience engages differently with more popular than less popular brands. So, the research question is: does social media popularity moderate the relationship between content tone (positive and negative) and engagement?
The researchers used data collected from Twitter and the Election Commission of India (ECI). They got political candidates’ tweets, number of times each tweet was retweeted, and the popularity of each candidate on Twitter. They combined this with other offline characteristics of candidates and parties obtained from ECI. They employed the Naives Bayes sentiment classification algorithm to categorize the tweets into negative or positive toned ones.
They found that negative and positive toned tweets are associated with higher levels of engagement. They also found that the effect of positive tone on engagement reduces as popularity of human brands increases. Positive effects of negative toned content are greater when the tone of related candidates is negative, and the positive effect of positive toned content is greater when the tone of related brands is positive.
Authors’ Names: Prof. Seema Gupta
Journal Name: Information Systems Research
Journal Article: ‘The Effects of Social Media Content Created by Human Brands on Engagement: Evidence from the Indian General Elections 2014’ - Prof. Seema Gupta
Abstract: Human brands, including celebrities, politicians, musicians, CEOs, are often more influential users of social media than brands. For instance, while Coca Cola has 3.33 million followers on Twitter, Barack Obama has more than 107 million followers on Twitter and Cristiano Ronaldo’s FB page has more than 120 million followers.
Content generated by human brands can be positive or negative in tone. While positive content may be uninteresting and not entice the curiosity of the audience, negative tones may be perceived as more interesting and engaging. At the same time, followers may not want to associate with negative toned content for fear of unintended backlash.
This paper addresses the question – what is the impact of tone of content on engagement? Human brands with a large number of followers will have higher engagement levels than those with a smaller number of followers. Audience engages differently with more popular than less popular brands. So, the research question is: does social media popularity moderate the relationship between content tone (positive and negative) and engagement?
The researchers used data collected from Twitter and the Election Commission of India (ECI). They got political candidates’ tweets, number of times each tweet was retweeted, and the popularity of each candidate on Twitter. They combined this with other offline characteristics of candidates and parties obtained from ECI. They employed the Naives Bayes sentiment classification algorithm to categorize the tweets into negative or positive toned ones.
They found that negative and positive toned tweets are associated with higher levels of engagement. They also found that the effect of positive tone on engagement reduces as popularity of human brands increases. Positive effects of negative toned content are greater when the tone of related candidates is negative, and the positive effect of positive toned content is greater when the tone of related brands is positive.
Authors’ Names: Prof. Seema Gupta
Journal Name: Information Systems Research
