Effective Messaging on Social Media: What Makes Online Content Go Viral?

Maryam Mousavi; Hasan Davulcu; Mohsen Ahmadi; Robert Axelrod; Richard Davis; Scott Atran

doi:10.1145/3485447.3512016

Effective Messaging on Social Media: What Makes Online Content Go Viral?

Maryam Mousavi, Hasan Davulcu, Mohsen Ahmadi, Robert Axelrod, Richard Davis, Scott Atran

Engineering, Ira A. Fulton Schools of (IAFSE)

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution

4 Scopus citations

Abstract

In this paper, we propose and test three content-based hypotheses that significantly increase message virality. We measure virality as the retweet counts of messages in a pair of real-world Twitter datasets A large dataset - UK Brexit with 51 million tweets from 2.8 million users between June 1, 2015 and May 12, 2019 and a smaller dataset - Nord Stream 2 with 516,000 tweets from 250,000 users between October 1, 2019 and October 15, 2019. We hypothesize, test and conclude that messages incorporating "negativity bias", "causal arguments"and "threats to personal or societal core values of target audiences"singularly and jointly increase message virality on social media.

Original language	English (US)
Title of host publication	WWW 2022 - Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2022
Publisher	Association for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages	2957-2966
Number of pages	10
ISBN (Electronic)	9781450390965
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1145/3485447.3512016
State	Published - Apr 25 2022
Event	31st ACM World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2022 - Virtual, Online, France Duration: Apr 25 2022 → Apr 29 2022

Publication series

Name	WWW 2022 - Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2022

Conference

Conference	31st ACM World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2022
Country/Territory	France
City	Virtual, Online
Period	4/25/22 → 4/29/22

Keywords

Causal Arguments
Core Values
Message Effectiveness
Message Virality
Negativity Bias

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Computer Networks and Communications
Software

Access to Document

10.1145/3485447.3512016

Cite this

Effective Messaging on Social Media: What Makes Online Content Go Viral? / Mousavi, Maryam; Davulcu, Hasan; Ahmadi, Mohsen et al.
WWW 2022 - Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2022. Association for Computing Machinery, Inc, 2022. p. 2957-2966 (WWW 2022 - Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2022).

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution

Mousavi, M, Davulcu, H, Ahmadi, M, Axelrod, R, Davis, R & Atran, S 2022, Effective Messaging on Social Media: What Makes Online Content Go Viral? in WWW 2022 - Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2022. WWW 2022 - Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2022, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc, pp. 2957-2966, 31st ACM World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2022, Virtual, Online, France, 4/25/22. https://doi.org/10.1145/3485447.3512016

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AB - In this paper, we propose and test three content-based hypotheses that significantly increase message virality. We measure virality as the retweet counts of messages in a pair of real-world Twitter datasets A large dataset - UK Brexit with 51 million tweets from 2.8 million users between June 1, 2015 and May 12, 2019 and a smaller dataset - Nord Stream 2 with 516,000 tweets from 250,000 users between October 1, 2019 and October 15, 2019. We hypothesize, test and conclude that messages incorporating "negativity bias", "causal arguments"and "threats to personal or societal core values of target audiences"singularly and jointly increase message virality on social media.

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Effective Messaging on Social Media: What Makes Online Content Go Viral?

Abstract

Publication series

Conference

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Access to Document

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