Comparisons Between Text-Only and Multimedia Tweets on User Engagement

Having highly engaged followers on social media allows us to spread information, seek feedback, and promote a sense of community efficiently. Crafting engaging posts, however, requires careful thoughts, creativity, and communication skills. This research studied tweets and explored the effect of content types on user engagement. More specifically, we compared the number of likes and retweets between text-only and multimedia tweets. We analyzed four Twitter accounts relevant to the City of Edmonton, Canada, and performed negative binomial regressions to model the expected count of likes and retweets based on accounts, content types, and their interaction. The results showed that multimedia content increased engagement in two of the four accounts but did not change engagement significantly in the other two. In other words, multimedia content had a positive or neutral effect on user engagement, depending on accounts. Our analysis also showed the effectiveness of well-written texts in attracting the attention of users. Tweets, by design, are text-oriented, and posting multimedia content may help, but is not a necessary condition to engage with followers effectively on Twitter.