The Impact of Content Characteristics on Twitter Audience Engagement: An Empirical Investigation of the Canadian NHL Organizations

The aim of the research was to empirically investigate user engagement on the official Twitter pages of professional ice-hockey organizations. The hypotheses were formulated based on the Uses & Gratifications theory and the degree of vividness of a brand post. In particular, academics have identified information-seeking, entertainment, and interactivity as one of the primary motives for audiences to engage with the media content. The framework for a degree of the content vividness was developed as follows: the low level was represented with posts embodying text only, the medium level contained images, while the highest level was considered to be a tweet that was accompanied with a video, which was further divided into two sub-categories of game highlights and videos with out of the rink activities. The results showed that ice-hockey fans are more likely to engage with the content that was posted on the social media pages if it contains an entertaining or interactive type of content. Furthermore, it was found that low vivid characteristics, thus tweets containing only text have a significant and positive impact on the number of times users replied to the post.