Effective Messaging on Social Media: What Makes Online Content Go Viral?

In this paper, we propose and test three content-based hypotheses that significantly increase message virality. We measure virality as the retweet counts of messages in a pair of real-world Twitter datasets A large dataset - UK Brexit with 51 million tweets from 2.8 million users between June 1, 2015 and May 12, 2019 and a smaller dataset - Nord Stream 2 with 516,000 tweets from 250,000 users between October 1, 2019 and October 15, 2019. We hypothesize, test and conclude that messages incorporating “negativity bias”, “causal arguments” and “threats to personal or societal core values of target audiences” singularly and jointly increase message virality on social media.