Abstract

The presence of hashtags in social media conversations is now a norm and represents the public’s perceptions of associations between entities in reference to events, emotions, personal tastes, and preferences. Much is yet unknown about relationships among hashtags and how they impact performance and information diffusion in relation to associated entities, brands, and personalities. This study examines the relationship between strength of network ties with performance and information diffusion. We adhere to the strength of ties theory of Granovetter (1973) which implies that weak and strong ties between entities have different implications to performance and information diffusion. Using Twitter data from the 2018 Super Bowl advertisements, we found that advertisements with weak ties (low network density) tend to be associated with higher performance while those with strong ties (high network density) are more likely to relate to higher information diffusion. Contributions to both research and practice are discussed.

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