Antecedents of Retweeting in a (Political) Marketing Context

Abstract

Word of mouth disseminates across Twitter by means of retweeting; however, the antecedents of retweeting have not received much attention. We used the chi-square automatic interaction detection (CHAID) decision tree predictive method (Kass, 1980) with readily available Twitter data, and manually coded sentiment and content data, to identify why some tweets are more likely to be retweeted than others in a (political) marketing context. The analysis includes four CHAID models: (1) using message structure variables only, (2) source variables only, (3) message content and sentiment variables only, and (4) a combined model using source, message structure, message content, and sentiment variables. The aggregated predictive model correctly classified retweeting behavior with a 76.7% success rate. Retweeting tends to occur when the originator has a high number of Twitter followers and the sentiment of the tweet is negative, contradicting previous research (East, Hammond, & Wright, 2007 ; Wu, 2013) but concurring with others (Hennig-Thurau, Wiertz, & Feldhaus, 2014). Additionally, particular types of tweet content are associated with high levels of retweeting, in particular those tweets including fear appeals or expressing support for others, while others are associated with very low levels of retweeting, such as those mentioning the sender's personal life. Managerial implications and research directions are presented. We make a methodological contribution by illustrating how CHAID predictive modeling can be used for Twitter data analysis and a theoretical contribution by providing insights into why retweeting occurs in a (political) marketing context.

Examining consumer behaviour in the UK Energy sector through the sentimental and thematic analysis of tweets

“…Each social media platform has created its own identity in terms of what it can offer its users. For example, Twitter is an interactive microblogging social media platform that builds engagement via short message dissemination (Natarajan, Balakrishnan, Balasubramanian, & Manickavasagam, 2014; Walker, Baines, Dimitriu, & Macdonald, 2017). Twitter differs from other social media domains in multiple ways: namely, its ability to facilitate real‐time conversation, its precise format, its customer service, and its popularity in engagement (Ibrahim, Wang, & Bourne, 2017; Parmar, 2015).…”

Embedding, quoting, or paraphrasing? Investigating the effects of political leaders’ tweets in online news articles: The case of Donald Trump

“…Influential tweets, that can shape the attention of the press, are easy to read, plainspoken, and come from actors who are otherwise unavailable for contact (Parmelee, 2014); moreover, research shows that journalists are also more likely to cover tweets in connection to negativity, conflict, and scandals (Ekman and Widholm, 2015: 86). In this respect, journalists may just follow what generates activity on Twitter as existing analyses of the popularity of politicians’ tweets find that retweet likelihood increases with the size of the politician’s network and with the negative emotional content of the tweet (Walker et al, 2017). At the same time, this also suggests that strategies prominently used by populist politicians—such as cultivating a large online followership network, courting scandals, using simple language, restricting one’s availability for regular contact by journalists (Brands et al, 2018; Gonawela et al, 2018; Wodak, 2015), not to mention the high frequency of negative posts (Gonawela et al, 2018: 309)—may be particularly effective in allowing politicians to influence the media’s agenda, while at the same time, heightening “the salience of attributes that are favorable to the leader who is tweeting” (Parmelee, 2014: 443).…”

“…Our research focuses only on Trump’s tweets, but the attention given to any politician tweet (through likes and retweets) hinges on its emotional content and on the politician’s large followership (Walker et al, 2017). Thus, the effects we observe in our studies should extend to other popular non-populist politicians whose emotional persuasive tweets end up in the news.…”

Exploring Social Media Marketing In Business: Influence on Product Adoption Perspective

“…Twitter is that mycology social networking platform through which individuals can post or tweet comments to those who subscribe or follow the blogger. It is a popular microblogging social media platform that enables rapid short message dissemination (Walker et al, 2017). As an immediate and ease of use platforms, Twitter has been used for news, politics, business, entertainment, and personal tweeting.…”