Document Type
Dissertation
First Faculty Advisor
DeMoranville, Carol
Keywords
Twitter; Word-of-mouth; face-to-face; word of mouth; face to face; social media; brand; consumer; movies; positivity; negativity
Publisher
Bryant University
Abstract
Word-of-mouth communication is important to organizations because it is a free form of advertising and has been shown to be influential on consumers’ purchasing decisions. Marketers of course, would like WOM to be positive and thus increase brand reputation and sales. In the past decade, new forms of communication have created different channels for WOM to travel through. Current social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter allow one person to send a message to many almost instantaneously. This study’s objective is to examine the WOM on the networking site Twitter. Previous research has indentified the relative incidence rates of both positive and negative recommendations for face-to-face WOM, but the anonymity of Twitter may result in different rates. Looking at recent box office movies, over 2,000 posts, commonly called “tweets” were collected to examine the valence. The results were unexpected. Every movie examined, despite how critics reviewed them, received overwhelmingly positive results, with the average close to a 9 to 1 ratio.
