Are You What You Tweet? The Impact of Sentiment on Digital News Consumption and Social Media Sharing

In the current ecosystems of digital content and news media, social media have become important for content providers to increase their online advertising revenue as well as their digital presence by attracting site traffic. Motivated by the theoretical and practical importance of understanding the factors affecting content virality, this study examines the role of content sentiment on content consumption. Using rich clickstream data on online news readership obtained from an English newspaper in an Asian country and social media data collected from Twitter, we find a differential effect of sentiment on readership and sharing behaviour across news content sites and third-party social media platforms. The results show that people are likely to read news articles having negative sentiment on news websites, but tend to share articles with positive sentiment on Twitter. Specifically, a 1 percent increase in content sentiment is associated with a 1.77 percent decrease in page views, whereas it is associated with a 1.47 percent increase in Twitter sharing, respectively. To uncover the underlying mechanism of the findings, we test the key intuitions from prior self-presentation literature. We find that an increase in a Twitter user's followers (i.e., audience size) leads to an increase in the Twitter user's propensity to share positive news articles. Our findings regarding the role of sentiment on content consumption provide direct and actionable implications for news editors with respect to crafting their content to attract more readers. Further, this paper contributes to the emerging literature on content engineering, which aims to develop content design strategies by combining content characteristics extracted from large-scale textual data with business-related outcomes