Sentiment and Engagement: A Study of Social Information on YouTube

Engagement is crucial for social media experiences. Prior research has examined social media engagement across various platforms (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, YouTube) across diverse domains, including government services (Xu et al., 2019), music sharing (Liikkanen & Salovaara, 2015), and political communication (Stieglitz & Dang-Xuan, 2013). These studies demonstrate that various factors, including content, influence social media engagement. Social media content can be categorized into primary and secondary forms. Primary content, created by content creators, serves as the initial draw for viewers. Secondary content, generated by viewers, represents their evaluations and interpretations of the primary content. This evaluative information, often referred to as social information (Möller et al., 2021), is pervasive on social media platforms and plays a critical role in shaping users’ perceptions of and reactions to primary content. Therefore, understanding the characteristics of social information is essential to fully grasp the dynamics of social media engagement. Despite its importance, research on social information in relation to social media engagement remains limited, as existing studies predominantly focus on how primary content is linked to social media engagement. This proposed study seeks to address this gap by investigating the relationship between social information and engagement on social media. We are particularly interested in how emotional cues displayed in social information are linked with social media engagement, given the salient role of emotion in shaping perception and behaviors in social interactions (Van Kleef, 2010). Specifically, we focus on the relationship between the sentiment embedded in viewer comments and engagement behavior on social media. We will develop hypotheses grounded in the literature on emotion and social media engagement and test them by sampling YouTube science videos. This study will enrich the literature on social media engagement by broadening the literature’s focus from the primary content to the secondary content. It will shed new light on the intricacies of sentiments in social information and social media engagement and contribute to the broader discourse on the complex relationships between emotion and engagement with technology. The insights will be valuable for content creators and platform providers seeking more effective ways to engage users and foster meaningful communication in social media environments.