The Relationship Among Volumes, Specificity, and Influence of Social Media Information

This paper takes a first step towards understanding the relationship between content and influence by addressing the following research questions: i) Is content a driver of social media influence? ii) What are the characteristics of content that help increase social media influence? The paper takes a behavioural perspective by investigating characteristics of content that are an outcome of behavioural decisions made by social media users. In particular, this research focuses on two behavioural variables, volumes and specificity. The paper hypothesizes a negative association between volumes and influence, while it puts forward a positive association between specificity and influence. Based on empirical testing on a sample of about one million tweets, results fully support the second proposition, while they raise theoretical challenges on the first one, encouraging further research to understand the relationship between content and influence on social media.