How Message Features and Social Endorsements Affect the Longevity of News Sharing

Abstract

This study examined how message features and social endorsements affect the longevity of audience news sharing by analyzing behavioral data of social retransmission of New York Times health news articles, and associated article content and context data. The results showed that information utility-related message features increased the duration for which articles prompted email-based sharing, whereas emotional positivity and controversiality increased the longevity of social media-based sharing. Expressed emotional evocativeness and the absence of death-related words lengthened the duration for which articles prompted both email- and social media-based sharing. News retransmission, via either email or social media, was more likely to persist when the articles stayed on the “most-emailed” list for a longer time, showing social endorsement-driven cumulative advantage effects. The results further revealed synergistic interaction effects between social endorsements and message features. While social endorsements produced strong cumulative-advantage effects on the longevity of news sharing, articles with certain message features that are diagnostic of their inherent share-worthiness generated even stronger effects than those articles that appeared on the “most-emailed” list for the same amount of time but lacked such features. These features were expressed emotional evocativeness (email-based sharing), the absence of death-related words, and exemplification (social media-based sharing).