The effect of emotional positivity of brand-generated social media messages on consumer attention and information sharing

Abstract

The literature has overlooked whether emotional positivity in social media messages posted by brands has the same effect on different types of consumer engagement behaviors on social media. Furthermore, whether brands’ emotional positivity plays a role in shaping the impact of message emotionality is unclear. To address these gaps, the authors develop and test a model of the impact of emotional positivity of social media messages posted by brands on consumers’ personal engagement and interactive engagement behaviors. The authors also examine whether and how brand emotional positivity interacts with message emotional positivity in triggering these responses. Based on a sample of 62,255 Twitter messages posted by brands the authors find that, in general, emotional positivity has an opposite effect in terms of stimulating personal engagement (likes) versus interactive engagement (retweets). Brand emotional positivity negatively moderates the link between message positivity and both types of user responses.