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Impact of humour on firm-initiated social media conversations

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Abstract

Customer engagement is seen as a central measure of marketing effectiveness on social media; yet, very little is known about the factors that drive it. This research focuses on message characteristics and more specifically the role of humour in encouraging likes, comments and reposts. Based on a sample of firm-initiated Weibo posts by a Chinese provincial destination marketing organization, it investigates whether humorous messages overall are more effective, and specifically whether image-based humour is more effective than text-based humour. It also considers whether a message contains a product focus and is complex in terms of its length, lexical density and inclusion of multimodal elements. The findings confirm the proposed influence of humour (with picture-based humour particularly effective), but suggest an even stronger impact of non-product related contents and also indicate that message simplicity is important for eliciting customer engagement.

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Acknowledgements

This paper represents an extended version of an ENTER2017 paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratory for Intelligent Systems in Tourism, 440 N Wolfe Rd, Sunnyvale, CA, 94085, USA

    Jing Ge

  2. USC Center for Public Relations, Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California, 3502 Watt Way, Los Angeles, CA, 90089, USA

    Ulrike Gretzel

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  1. Jing Ge
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Correspondence to Jing Ge.

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This is an extended version of a conference paper entitled “The Role of Humour in Driving Customer Engagement” previously published in the proceedings of Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2017 Conference (ENTER 2017) held in Rome, Italy, January 24–26, 2017.

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Ge, J., Gretzel, U. Impact of humour on firm-initiated social media conversations. Inf Technol Tourism 18, 61–83 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40558-017-0097-0

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