Presenter(s): Brittani Lancaster
Co Presenter(s): Britta Bauer, Ramsey Sullivan, Annika Minges
Faculty Mentor(s): Dave Markowitz
Poster 156
Session: Social Sciences & Humanities
What is the relationship between using #ad in social media posts and Twitter engagement? Consistent with prior work suggesting that consumers prefer to receive insight from unsponsored rather than sponsored advertisements, we predicted that in a comparison of Tweets, those including #ad would have fewer favorites than Tweets that do not contain #ad. We performed a case study of Kendall Jenner’s Twitter account (N = 3,200 Tweets) and used RStudio’s rtweet package to scrape the Twitter data from her feed. We ran a t-test, comparing the mean number of favorites per Tweet for those that had #ad and those that did not. The average number of favorites for Tweets with #ad was more than double the average number of favorites on her tweets without #ad (p = .0096). The results from this research were statistically meaningful but inconsistent with our prediction. We believe these results suggest that consumers respond well to posts that are clearly distinguished as sponsored advertisements because there is no deception occurring. We offer theoretical explanations for these data and future work should test this contention experimentally.