Tweets on a horror movie: An investigation into relationships between sentiment strength, cognitive language and tweet virality

Abstract

This article studies how sentiment strength and cognitive language may influence the levels of tweet virality. A total of 11,381 tweets about a horror movie (‘Mother!’) were collected. Based on the definitions of two independent variables: sentiment strength and cognitive language use, and the dependent variable: tweet virality, the data descriptive statistics and analysis of variance (ANOVA) analysis were applied to reveal the relationships between tweet virality and sentiment and cognitive factors. The results indicate that a high tweet virality is associated with either a lower level of sentiment strength or/and a higher level of cognitive language use by a statistically significant margin. This finding is more evident for negative tweets. The study findings help improve the understanding about sentimental and cognitive factors impacting tweet virality and guide the movie industry to improve marketing movie content to achieve high virality on social media. The conclusions can also be applied to other industries, government agencies, organisations and individuals who intend to quickly disseminate specific information on social media platforms.