Ted Matherly, Jared Watson and Kalinda Ukanwa, under review, Journal of Marketing.
With increased competition in the attention economy, content creators need sustainable strategies for cultivating consumer engagement. One common strategy is to develop relationships with audiences, and prior research has shown that use of first-person singular pronouns (FPP), such as “I” or “me,” can be used to build relationships and increase engagement in the short-term. However, we argue that the effects of FPP are dynamic, changing as a relationship evolves. Through a unique panel data set of content creator and audience dyads on Twitter, we replicate earlier findings that FPP is associated with increased engagement initially, while also observing that this effect is underestimated almost nine-fold when relationship duration is not considered. Crucially, we find this initial positive effect of FPP attenuates over time, eventually yielding negative effects on engagement. We propose that this occurs because the continued use of FPP suggests self-focus to the audience, rather than the relationship-building motivations initially inferred. We show converging evidence through moderation tests, exploration of boundary conditions and additional experiments. Our results suggest that content creators must consider the stage of their relationships with their audience members and the mix of recent versus long-term followers when using FPP to generate engagement.
Cover photo by bixentro, licensed Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0 DEED).