How Readability Shapes Social Media Engagement

Abstract

We suggest that text readability plays an important role in driving consumer engagement on social media. Consistent with a processing fluency account, we find that easy-to-read posts are more liked, commented on, and shared on social media. We analyze over 4,000 Facebook posts from <i>Humans of New York</i>, a popular photography blog on social media, over a 3-year period to see how readability shapes social media engagement. The results hold when controlling for photo features, story valence, and other content-related characteristics. Experimental findings further demonstrate the causal impact of readability and the processing fluency mechanism in the context of a fictitious brand community. This research articulates the impact of processing fluency on brief word-of-mouth transmissions in the real world while empirically demonstrating that readability as a message feature matters. It also extends the impact of processing fluency to a novel behavioral outcome: commenting and sharing actions.