It's Not What You Say, It's How You Say It: Language Use on Facebook Impacts Employability But Not Attractiveness

Abstract

The expansion and increasing diversity of the Internet has seen a growth in user-generated online content, and an escalation in incorrect and nonstandardized language use (e.g., text speak). This evolution has been exemplified by social networking sites such as Facebook. In our experiment, participants viewed six Facebook profiles whose walls contained status updates that were either spelled correctly, incorrectly, or using text speak, and then rated the profile owners on measures of attractiveness and employability. It was shown that language use had no impact on attractiveness, but users who used correct language were seen as more intelligent, competent, and employable. These results highlight the need to control language in this area of research by demonstrating the variables' seemingly elevated importance to employers compared to peers. The findings also pave the way for further exploration of the Warranting Theory of impression formation online and the role of language in social media-based identity statements and behavioral residue.

F*c*book: Swearing impacts impression formation on social media

“…Whilst attitudes towards swearing may be becoming more liberal (Jay and Jay, 2013), our results demonstrate that there is still a cost of swearing, particularly in terms of professionalism, and we should bear this in mind when choosing what content on our social media is publicly available. These findings are also consistent with previous findings by Scott et al (2014) that unstandardized language (in their study text-speak and spelling errors) leads to lower ratings of employability than standardised language. It cannot be determined from these results whether swearing is simply viewed as another type of unstandardized language, or if there is an additional taboo associated with swearing which has a differential effect on impression formation.…”

“…As this dimension is a predictor of employability (Potgieter and Coetzee, 2013) it could explain these results. Previous studies (e.g., Scott et al, 2014) found higher employability ratings for female than male targets using samples where the majority of participants were also women. The fact that we replicate these findings, and find no difference between the ratings given by men and women, suggest that such perceptions are generalisable.…”

“…Individual warrants, or Facebook timeline components, can affect impressions formed of timeline owners when manipulated in isolation (e.g., Scott et al, 2014). When investigating their effect on impression formation researchers have typically investigated three categories of perceived impressions: personality traits (e.g., Fullwood et al, 2015); social constructs such as popularity, and social-, physical-, and task attractiveness (e.g., Tong et al, 2008); and employability constructs such as intelligence, competence, and employability .…”

“…Use of destandardized language is related to offline ability: education level is a predictor of online spelling mistakes (Hargittai, 2006) and a negative correlation exists between text speak on SNSs and literary skill (Drouin, 2011). Scott et al, (2014) manipulated the language used in Facebook timeline content and measured its effect on perceived attractiveness and employability. While controlling for content, they presented status updates using correct English, 'incorrect' English (i.e., spelling/grammar mistakes), and text speak.…”

Investigating the Impacts of Brand Social Media Posts’ Linguistic Styles on Consumer Engagement

“…In the social media context, informality is related to the use of some linguistic features, such as abbreviations (e.g., LOL for 'laughing out loud', OMW for 'on my way'), emojis (e.g., , , ), or non-standard spellings (e.g., hv for 'have', msg for 'message'), contractions (e.g., don't, can't, and it's), and personal pronouns (e.g., we, you, and us) [24,46]. Sociolinguistics research has suggested that the communication style (formal vs. informal) used by the communicators can affect the interlocutors' response and the effects of the communication [see [47][48][49]. Research has suggested that the informal communication style can soften the hierarchical power relationships, reduce social distance between communicators, and thus can enhance the relationships [24,50].…”