The Importance of Interactions Between Content Characteristics and Creator Characteristics for Studying Virality in Social Media

Why does a social media post go viral? Two approaches to understand this mystery are content-based research and creator-based research. Both content characteristics and creator characteristics have been examined for their influence on virality. But the relationships between them are rarely discussed. We propose an extension to our existing conceptual framework to study the interactions between content and creator variables. And we demonstrate the significance of the interactions using data from 800,000 tweets. We find that by adding content-–creator interactions, the predictive power of the model improves significantly, which underlines the importance of the interactions for studying virality in social media. We also provide insights for managers on shaping their social media presence and strategy to use social media popularity for marketing and brand building.