Making retweeting social: The influence of content and context information on sharing news in Twitter

Spreading news in Web 2.0 is easy and ubiquitous, especially in Twitter via retweeting. However, while some news develops viral power, other remains disregarded. The paper presents two laboratory experiments about potentially influencing criteria on retweeting. Study 1 investigated whether content criteria (informational value) and context criteria (agent awareness) influence retweeting decisions. It was hypothesized that agent awareness would moderate the influence of informational value on retweeting. Results did not confirm the hypothesis but instead revealed that both high informational value and agent awareness information led to retweeting. Further, the influence of both informational value and agent awareness on retweeting was mediated by the perceived importance of the tweets. Study 2 investigated the influence of the informational value of the news, agent awareness, and in-group reference. It was hypothesized that the influence of informational value and of agent awareness on retweeting are moderated by in-group reference. The results confirmed these assumptions and showed that informational value had more influence if agents did not belong to a salient in-group compared to if they did. In contrast, agent awareness had more influence if agents belonged to a salient in-group compared to if they did not.