What makes people willing to comment on social media posts? The roles of interactivity and perceived contingency in online corporate social responsibility communication

ABSTRACT

Interactivity is an important concept in the study of online social processes. Two experiments tested how interactivity influenced people’s willingness to comment on social media and their perceptions of a company’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) efforts. Across two operationalizations of interactivity (presence/absence of replies, high/low degree of reference to earlier messages), interactivity led to greater perceived contingency, which led to greater willingness to comment and more positive CSR perceptions. Results advance the interactivity effects model by demonstrating that (a) perceived contingency plays a crucial role in interactivity effects, (b) language intensity moderates the relationship between perceived contingency and willingness to comment, and (c) perceived contingency is fostered only by companies’ interactive messages and not consumers’ interactive messages.

KEYWORDS:

• Interactivity
• corporate social responsibility
• perceived contingency
• willingness to comment
• corporate stakeholder perceptions

Data availability statement

The data underlying this article will be shared on reasonable request to the corresponding author. This study was approved by the Institutional Review Board of the University of California, Santa Barbara (approval number: 5-19-0848).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The core idea of exchanging interrelated messages may have implications beyond the narrow contexts in which these ideas were originally conceptualized. For a broader perspective, see Weick (1979), who proposed that double interacts (comprising acts and interacts) form the “stable building blocks” (p. 110) of organizational communication.