The Effects of Social Media Content Created by Human Brands on Engagement: Evidence from Indian General Election 2014

• Published in: Information systems research 2021-03, Vol.32 (1), p.212-237
• Main Authors: Mallipeddi, Rakesh R., Janakiraman, Ramkumar, Kumar, Subodha, Gupta, Seema
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Audiences; Brands; Digital media; Elections; engagement; human brand generated content; human brands; Human influences; political marketing; social media analytics; social media tone; Social networks; User generated content
• ISSN: 1047-7047; 1526-5536
• DOI: 10.1287/isre.2020.0961

With human brands or individual celebrities in fields ranging from sports to politics increasingly using social media platforms to engage with their audience, it is important to understand the key drivers of online engagement. Using Twitter data from the political domain, we show that positive and negative-toned content receive higher engagement, as measured by retweets, than mixed or neutral toned tweets. However, less popular human brands generate higher social media engagement from positive-toned content compared with more popular human brands. Therefore, we recommend that popular human brands (e.g., popular politicians or chief executive officers) keep their content objective rather than emotional. Furthermore, the tone of related brands (i.e., human brands who belong to the same political party) has a strong reinforcement effect; that is, social media engagement is higher when the tone of the focal human brand and related brands are the same and lower when the tones are different. Therefore, we prescribe that human brands actively coordinate their social media content with related brands to generate higher engagement. From human brands’ perspective, our findings recommend a comprehensive social media strategy, which takes into account the tone of content, tone of related brands’ content, and human brands’ popularity. Individual celebrities or human brands in fields ranging from sports to art to politics use social media platforms to connect and engage with their audience. We analyze the effects of content generated by human brands (referred to as human brand generated content ) on a popular social media platform, Twitter, on audience engagement. The first objective of this study is to examine the effects of positive and negative tone of human generated content on social media engagement. Next, we study the impact of popularity of human brands on the effect of tone on audience’s engagement. Building on the arguments of perception spillover effects, we also investigate the effects of content generated by related human brands on the engagement of the focal human brand. Set in the context of the 2014 Indian general election, we find that both positive-toned content and negative-toned content have a positive effect on social media engagement. We find that the popularity of a human brand negatively moderates the relationship between positive‐toned content and engagement. Our findings indicate interesting spillover effects of content created by related brand