How emotions influence individual’s content contribution? A perspective of individual and group interaction

Abstract

The popularity of social media makes more and more marketers carry out practices through social medias. However, the rapid change and diversity of individual emotions in social media make marketers need to pay attention to the influence of emotions on the performance of marketing. We draw on social contagion theory, as well individual personality to investigate how individual and group emotional characteristics, namely emotional tendency and conflict, influence their content contribution. Based on a panel data from Sina Weibo, we used a panel vector regression to examine these issues empirically. The findings reveal that: both individual and group emotional characteristics have the impact on individual content contribution. Moreover, group emotional characteristics have the moderating effects on the process of individual emotional tendency influencing their content contribution. The study extends the marketing literature by exploring the moderating effects of group emotions. We also provide suggestions for the future research.