earticle

영어

In this paper, we explore retweet mechanism by investigating the effect of message characteristics on information diffusion in terms of volume and speed. To this end, we select four main keywords (e.g., ‘무상급식’, ‘나가수’, ‘김연아’, and ‘iPhone’) that have recently been popular on online social media, embrace various social aspects, and represent distinctive message characteristics. Analyzing the frequency and velocity of retweeting for each keyword, we find that more than half of posted messages on Twitter contain personal opinions for the certain keyword, but we also find that when being retweeted, the group of messages related to the certain keyword present distinctive diffusion patters and speed according to message characteristics. The findings in the study not only broaden our theoretical knowledge of information diffusion mechanism over online social media but also provide managerial implications regarding how to strategically utilize online social media for marketing communication with customers.