Why Do You Spread This Message? Understanding Users Sentiment in Social Media Campaigns

TL;DR

This study investigates how followers' sentiment towards social media campaigns influences their retweeting behavior and demonstrates that targeting followers based on sentiment can enhance message dissemination.

Contribution

The paper provides empirical evidence linking follower sentiment to retweet rates and introduces an intervention method that improves message spread by targeting followers' sentiment.

Findings

Significant correlation between sentiment and retweet rate

Sentiment-based targeting increases retweeting effectiveness

Sentiment analysis can inform better campaign strategies

Abstract

Twitter has been increasingly used for spreading messages about campaigns. Such campaigns try to gain followers through their Twitter accounts, influence the followers and spread messages through them. In this paper, we explore the relationship between followers sentiment towards the campaign topic and their rate of retweeting of messages generated by the campaign. Our analysis with followers of multiple social-media campaigns found statistical significant correlations between such sentiment and retweeting rate. Based on our analysis, we have conducted an online intervention study among the followers of different social-media campaigns. Our study shows that targeting followers based on their sentiment towards the campaign can give higher retweet rate than a number of other baseline approaches.