Abstract

Exploring Key Factors Driving VR/AR Virality on SMPs via Reddit Comments TREO Talk Paper Fardad Faress Department of Information Systems University of Texas Rio Grande Valley fardad.faress01@utrgv.edu Bin Wang Department of Information Systems University of Texas Rio Grande Valley bin.wang@utrgv.edu Mina Esfanjani Department of Control engineering Azad University Esfsnjani.m@hotmail.com Abstract As virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technologies gain momentum, discussions about them on social media platforms like Reddit and Quora have surged. Despite the popularity of viral marketing, its influencing factors have not been thoroughly investigated and it is not so popular among people (Borges-Tiago, M. T., Tiago, F., & Cosme, C., 2019). This research delves into the factors influencing the virality of VR/AR content on these platforms, considering the complexity of human behavior and the dynamics of online sharing that lead to confusion among business owners regarding the factors important for social media platform users to make a service or product viral and more attractive (Qin, H., Osatuyi, B., & Xu, L., 2021). The analysis utilizes comments from Reddit and Quora that discuss VR/AR topics, employing Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques such as Topic Modeling, Named Entity Recognition, Emotion & Sentiment Analysis, and Linguistic Feature Extraction. Despite the rapid flourish and the growing importance of VR/AR, recent research suggests that managers lack insight into how AR might engage customers and require guidance in targeting customers who will embrace AR (Jessen et al., 2020). The findings aim to shed light on factors such as the role of emotion-focused content (anger, anticipation, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise, trust), information-focused content (names, locations, organizations), and linguistic features (number of words, hashtags) in the virality of VR/AR content on social platforms like Reddit and Quora. This research seeks to address the gap in the literature by examining these factors comprehensively, providing insights into how content creators can increase the virality of their VR/AR content. The methodology involves scraping data from Reddit and Quora, specifically focusing on comments related to VR/AR, their replies, and votes. Secondary data will be used to test the conceptual framework, and a mixed-effects linear regression model will be employed for analysis. This modeling approach has gained prominence in social media content-sharing research and has been applied extensively in studies about advertising and virality analyses (Boksem and Smidts, 2015; Tellis et al., 2019).

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