research-article

Causal Effects of Brevity on Style and Success in Social Media

Authors:

Kristina Gligorić,

Ashton Anderson,

Robert WestAuthors Info & Claims

Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, Volume 3, Issue CSCW

Article No.: 45, Pages 1 - 23

https://doi.org/10.1145/3359147

Published: 07 November 2019 Publication History

Abstract

In online communities, where billions of people strive to propagate their messages, understanding how wording affects success is of primary importance. In this work, we are interested in one particularly salient aspect of wording: brevity. What is the causal effect of brevity on message success? What are the linguistic traits of brevity? When is brevity beneficial, and when is it not? Whereas most prior work has studied the effect of wording on style and success in observational setups, we conduct a controlled experiment, in which crowd workers shorten social media posts to prescribed target lengths and other crowd workers subsequently rate the original and shortened versions. This allows us to isolate the causal effect of brevity on the success of a message. We find that concise messages are on average more successful than the original messages up to a length reduction of 30--40%. The optimal reduction is on average between 10% and 20%. The observed effect is robust across different subpopulations of raters and is the strongest for raters who visit social media on a daily basis. Finally, we discover unique linguistic and content traits of brevity and correlate them with the measured probability of success in order to distinguish effective from ineffective shortening strategies. Overall, our findings are important for developing a better understanding of the effect of brevity on the success of messages in online social media.

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Index Terms

Causal Effects of Brevity on Style and Success in Social Media
1. Information systems
  1. World Wide Web
    1. Web applications
      1. Crowdsourcing
      2. Social networks

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cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction

Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction Volume 3, Issue CSCW

November 2019

5026 pages

EISSN:2573-0142

DOI:10.1145/3371885

Editors:
Airi Lampinen
Stockholm University, Sweden
,
Darren Gergle
Northwestern University, USA
,
David A. Shamma
FXPAL, USA

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Published: 07 November 2019

Published in PACMHCI Volume 3, Issue CSCW

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https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2024.114573
Gligorić KLifchits GWest RAnderson A(2023)Linguistic effects on news headline success: Evidence from thousands of online field experiments (Registered Report)PLOS ONE10.1371/journal.pone.028168218:3(e0281682)Online publication date: 24-Mar-2023
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0281682
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