How Readability Shapes Social Media Engagement

By E. Pancer, Vincent Chandler, Maxwell Poole, Theodore J. Noseworthy. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 2018

110 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We suggest that text readability plays an important role in driving consumer engagement on social media. Consistent with a processing fl uency account, we fi nd that easy-to-read posts are more liked, commented on, and shared on social media. We analyze over 4,000 Facebook posts from Humans of New York , a popular photography blog on social media, over a 3-year period to see how readability shapes social media engagement. The results hold when controlling for photo features, story valence, and other content-related characteristics. Experimental fi ndings further demonstrate the causal impact of readability and the processing fl uency mechanism in the context of a fi ctitious brand community. This research articulates the impact of processing fl uency on brief word-of-mouth transmissions in the real world while empirically demonstrating that readability as a message feature matters. It also extends the impact of processing fl uency to a novel behavioral outcome: commenting and sharing actions.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Sociology and Political Science, Human-Computer Interaction

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/318a2155d18ebe76a16f6611d7a3f07a23b2c65d