How should content creators narrate their content? The impact of emotionality flips on audience engagement

The creator economy marks a pivotal shift in influencer marketing. Content creators create long content to engage their audience on social media platforms and generate revenue through engagement. We hypothesize that audience engagement with content is a function of emotionality flips: the number of times emotionality flips direction (from a positive slope to a negative slope and vice versa) from one content unit (e.g., sentence) to another. Five studies—including 33,598 podcast episodes, 3,381 TED Talks, two lab experiments, and one synthetic validation—support this hypothesis. Furthermore, arousal is the underlying mechanism; that is, emotionality flips raise the audience’s arousal, which in turn boosts audience engagement. Lastly, emotionality flips’ positive effect is stronger for (1) content that is easier (vs. harder) to process, and (2) audiences with high (vs. low) need-for-affect. This research advances understanding of emotionality dynamics in the creator economy and offers insights for creators, platforms, and consumers.