Networked narratives on Humans of New York: A content analysis of social media engagement on Facebook

Abstract Humans of New York (HONY) is a popular Facebook page which has more than 13 million fans. The posts on HONY are termed as networked narratives, which are stories told on social media with technology affordances enabling story co-construction between the story tellers and the readers. A content analysis ( N = 390) was conducted to examine the popular topics on networked narratives and its impact on social media engagement as represented by the number of likes, the number of shares, and likability of characters featured in the post. Results revealed a set of topics of the networked narratives were associated with social media engagement. Also, the tone and the length of posts were associated with social media engagement.

[1]  Tamir Sheafer,et al.  How to Evaluate It: The Role of Story‐Evaluative Tone in Agenda Setting and Priming , 2007 .

[2]  H. Abbott.  The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative , 2020 .

[3]  Bobby J. Calder,et al.  Media Engagement and Advertising Effectiveness , 2015 .

[4]  C. Edward Wilson,et al.  The Effect of Medium on Loss of Information , 1974 .

[5]  D. Bakan.  The duality of human existence : an essay on psychology and religion , 1966 .

[6]  Anne Helmond,et al.  The like economy: Social buttons and the data-intensive web , 2013, New Media Soc..

[7]  Rick W. Busselle,et al.  Fictionality and Perceived Realism in Experiencing Stories: A Model of Narrative Comprehension and Engagement , 2008 .

[8]  Maximiliane Frobenius,et al.  From small stories to networked narrative: The evolution of personal narratives in Facebook status updates , 2013 .

[9]  Jennifer L. Bevan,et al.  A picture is worth a thousand words: A content analysis of Facebook profile photographs , 2011, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[10]  Gwenn W. Gröndal,et al.  Meta-analytic procedures for social research , 1993 .

[11]  J. Bruner.  Life as Narrative , 2014 .

[12]  Markus Appel,et al.  The Influence of Paratext on Narrative Persuasion: Fact, Fiction, or Fake? , 2012 .

[13]  Moonhee Cho,et al.  Public engagement with nonprofit organizations on Facebook , 2014 .

[14]  Monika Fludernik,et al.  Linguistics and literature: Prospects and horizons in the study of prose , 1996 .

[15]  Lin Qiu,et al.  Sharing emotion on Facebook: network size, density, and individual motivation , 2012, CHI EA '12.

[16]  Zhibin Lin,et al.  Factors driving young users' engagement with Facebook: Evidence from Brazil , 2016, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[17]  Yorgos Zotos,et al.  PEER: Looking into Consumer Engagement in e-WOM through Social Media , 2016 .

[18]  Veronica Liljander,et al.  Customer engagement in a Facebook brand community , 2012 .

[19]  Yi Ting Huang,et al.  Traits and stories: links between dispositional and narrative features of personality. , 2004, Journal of personality.

[20]  Robert Rosenthal,et al.  Judgment Studies: Design, Analysis, and Meta-Analysis , 1987 .

[21]  Melanie C. Green,et al.  This Story Is Not for Everyone: Transportability and Narrative Persuasion , 2010 .

[22]  Lous T. Heshusius-Gilsdorf,et al.  Girls are Females, Boys are Males: A Content Analysis of Career Materials. , 1975 .

[23]  Paul Skalski,et al.  Blinded by the light: Illuminating the dark side of social network use through content analysis , 2014, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[24]  D. McAdams.  The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self , 1997 .

[25]  Melanie C. Green,et al.  Transportation Into Narrative Worlds: The Role of Prior Knowledge and Perceived Realism , 2004 .

[26]  Jennifer L Bevan,et al.  How Are Important Life Events Disclosed on Facebook? Relationships with Likelihood of Sharing and Privacy , 2015, Cyberpsychology Behav. Soc. Netw..

[27]  J. Brockner,et al.  Value from hedonic experience and engagement. , 2006, Psychological review.

[28]  Zheng Wang,et al.  Wait! Don't Turn That Dial! More Excitement to Come! The Effects of Story Length and Production Pacing in Local Television News on Channel Changing Behavior and Information Processing in a Free Choice Environment , 2005 .

[29]  L. Hollebeek.  Exploring customer brand engagement: definition and themes , 2011 .

[30]  Hyunyi Cho,et al.  Perceived Realism , 2014, Commun. Res..

[31]  Tom Carey,et al.  Engagement as a Design Concept for Multimedia , 1995 .

[32]  D. Johnson,et al.  Changing Race Boundary Perception by Reading Narrative Fiction , 2014 .

[33]  Timothy D. Wilson,et al.  Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes. , 1977 .

[34]  Stephen Reysen,et al.  Construction of a new scale: The Reysen Likability Scale , 2005 .