What drives interaction in political actors’ Facebook posts? Profile and content predictors of user engagement and political actors’ reactions

ABSTRACT

Based on a quantitative content analysis of political actors’ Facebook posts (N = 1915), this study investigates profile-level and post-level drivers of user engagement (comments, likes, and shares) by employing a multilevel approach. For the first time in extant research, we also examine the factors that drive political actors to react to user comments. Findings indicate that the number of followers, the use of an official fan profile, and party vote share were negatively related to political actors’ reactions to user comments. Furthermore, party profiles were least successful in stimulating user engagement. On the post level, we found that reasoning, post length, and references to competitive political actors have the potential to increase different types of user engagement. Negative, but not positive tonality increased user engagement and positive emotional expressions had a stronger effect on user engagement than negative emotions. Furthermore, humorous posts were more likely to be commented, liked, or shared, while mobilization cues had predominantly negative effects on user engagement.

KEYWORDS:

• Content analysis
• social media
• political participation
• deliberation
• interactivity
• negativity bias
• emotions
• humor
• user engagement
• multilevel analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Raffael Heiss is a PhD candidate at the Department of Communication, University of Vienna, Austria. His research interests include digital communication, media effects, and political participation [email: [email protected]].

Desirée Schmuck is a PhD candidate at the Department of Communication, University of Vienna, Austria. Her research interests include right-wing populism, political communication, and sustainability communication effects [email: [email protected]].

Jörg Matthes is Full Professor of Advertising Research at the Department of Communication, University of Vienna, Austria. His research interests include advertising effects, public opinion formation, and methods [email: [email protected]].

Notes

1. It should be noted that at the time of our analyses, Facebook only included the classical thumb up like bottom and did not yet include variations, such as emotional reactions (angry, sad, love, etc.).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Austrian Federal Ministry of Science, Research and Economy [grant number SPA 05/198].