What makes it likeable? A study on the reactions to messages in a digital social network: the case of Facebook in Farsi

BACKGROUND: After a piece of information is put into a network, its fate depends on the behaviors of the nodes of the network; nodes that are equipped with the hardware and software of the age of information and are more powerful than any time in the past. This study suggests that a useful research for communication, marketing and advertising would be one that looks for patterns in the reactions of the nodes toward different pieces of information. RESULTS: This study has used Facebook to see how people have reacted to different types of messages in terms of liking, sharing and commenting. Rather than looking for universal, generalizable patterns we have tried to examine the practicality of the proposed method. The practical aspect of the study comes after a short theoretical discussion on the issue of flow of information in a digital world. The results revealed dozens of significant relations between the examined variables. CONCLUSIONS: This study, its theoretical discussion and results suggest that it would be practical to study the relations between the characteristics of Facebook messages and the type of reactions (liking, sharing and commenting) that they attract.