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The Importance of Interactions Between Content Characteristics and Creator Characteristics for Studying Virality in Social Media

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  • Yue Han

    (Madden School of Business, Le Moyne College, Syracuse, New York 13214;)

  • Theodoros Lappas

    (School of Business, Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, New Jersey 07030)

  • Gaurav Sabnis

    (School of Business, Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, New Jersey 07030)

Abstract

With the ubiquity of social media usage and influence, the phenomenon of virality—that is, large-scale diffusion and sharing of an online post—has received considerable scrutiny. Research on virality is of primarily two types. Content-based research focuses on how content characteristics influence virality, whereas creator-based research uses characteristics of the creator of the content to study virality. Through this research note, we aim to draw attention toward a relatively ignored set of constructs—the interactions between content characteristics and creator characteristics. We propose a typology of content features and content message on one hand and creator features and creator history on the other. We argue that adding nuanced content–creator interactions to the nomological network for virality will add conceptual richness and improve predictive validity of future studies. We demonstrate this by running models, with and without the interactions, on a data set of nearly 800,000 posts from Twitter. We find that many of these interactions are significant, improve goodness of fit by 20%, provide clues about contextual factors in virality, and boost predictive power by 12%. Our results and subsequent discussions of the findings hope to spur more research on content–creator interactions in understanding virality.

Suggested Citation

  • Yue Han & Theodoros Lappas & Gaurav Sabnis, 2020. "The Importance of Interactions Between Content Characteristics and Creator Characteristics for Studying Virality in Social Media," Information Systems Research, INFORMS, vol. 31(2), pages 576-588, June.
    • Handle: RePEc:inm:orisre:v:31:y:2020:i:2:p:576-588
    DOI: 10.1287/isre.2019.0903
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    References listed on IDEAS

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