Many social media users try to obtain as many followers as possible in a social network to gain influence, a challenge that is often referred to as the follow back problem. In this work we study different strategies for this problem in the context of politically polarized social networks and study how political partisanship affect social media users' propensity to follow each other. We test how contact strategy (liking, following) interacts with partisan alignment when trying to induce users to follow back. To do so, we conduct a field experiment on Twitter where we target N=8,104 active users using bot accounts that present as human. We found that users were more than twice as likely to reciprocally follow back bots whose partisanship matched their own. Conversely, when the only form of contact between the bot and the user was the bot liking the user’s posts, the follow rate was extremely low regardless of partisan alignment – and liking a user’s content and following them led to no increase in follow-back relative to just following the user. Finally, we found no partisanship asymmetries, such that Democrats and Republicans preferentially followed co-partisans to the same extent. Our results demonstrate the important impact of following users and having shared partisanship – and the irrelevance of liking users’ content – on solving the follow back problem.
Increasing Brand Attractiveness and Sales through Social Media Comments on Public Displays – Evidence from a Field Experiment in the Retail Industry
