The impact of headline features on the attraction of online financial articles

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/IJWIS-11-2018-0084
• Published date: 02 December 2019
• Pages: 510-534
• Date: 02 December 2019
• Author: Jie She,Tao Zhang
• Subject Matter: Information & knowledge management,Information & communications technology,Information systems,Library & information science,Information behaviour & retrieval,Internet

The impact of headline features

on the attraction of online

financial articles

Jie She

Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Shanghai, China, and

Tao Zhang

Information Management and Engineering College,

Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Shanghai, China

Abstract

Purpose –This study aims to investigate whether and to what extent the characteristics of headlines impact

the attraction of online financial articles by using data collected from WeChat, a popular socialapp in China.

Design/methodology/approach –By integrating the methods of econometric and text mining, this

study analyzedthe content of 113,917 headlines published by 126 officialaccounts from the day account being

created to May 12, 2016. Hierarchical regression was used to investigate the effects of headline features,

accountownership type and stock market volatility on the attractionof online financial articles.

Findings –The empirical resultsshow that sentiment, length, domain specificityand language intensity in

a headline are significantlyassociated with the attraction of an online financial article.In addition, the relative

and moderating roles of stock market volatility and account ownership type were also explored, showing

significantmoderating effects on the relationshipbetween sentiment and online article attraction.

Research limitations/implications –This study had several limitations.First, the sample data for this

research were collected from one social media platform. While WeChat is the most popular social media

application in China, it is justone of the many social media applications that can be used to publishonline

financial articles,and it differs from other social media applications greatly. Thismakes it hard to generalize

the conclusions of the study.Future studies could compare the different features of headlines and their effects

on the attraction of financial articleson different platforms. Second, in mining the characteristicsof headline,

this study only analyzed the influence of the sentiment,domain specificity, length and language intensity of

the headline on article attraction. In future studies, in-depth analysis of the headline content could be

conducted, such as the similaritybetween the body text and the headline, the theme and the sense of humor.

However,the authors believe that these limitationsdo not have major negative implications for the resultsand

contributionsof this study.

Practical implications –From a practical perspective,this work could help official WeChat accounts to

write betterheadlines for the articles they publish to attractmore readers and fans and thus improve the value

of their accounts, which would enable them to maximize the tangiblebenefits through differential pricing on

advertisementplacement.

Originality/value –The contributionsof this study are as follows. First, the paperexplored how headline

sentiment influences article attraction and found that positive sentiment is negatively related to article

attraction, while negativesentiment is positively related to article attraction. In addition,there is an inverted

U-shaped relationship between the extent of negative sentiment and article attraction. Second, the paper

investigates how headline domain specificity affects article attraction and there is an inverted U-shaped

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Fund of China under Grant No. 61572140,

the Shanghai Municipal R&D Foundation under Grant No. 17DZ1100504, the Humanities and Social

Sciences Planning Fund of Ministry of education of China under Grant No. 19YJA630116, the

Innovation Fund for graduate students of Shanghai University of Finance and Economics under

Grant No.CXJJ-2015-425.

IJWIS

15,5

510

Received28 November 2018

Revised12 February 2019

Accepted12 February 2019

InternationalJournal of Web

InformationSystems

Vol.15 No. 5, 2019

pp. 510-534

© Emerald Publishing Limited

1744-0084

DOI 10.1108/IJWIS-11-2018-0084

The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:

www.emeraldinsight.com/1744-0084.htm

relationship between headline domain specificity and article attraction. Third, to the best of the authors’

knowledge,this is the first large-scale case study that explores the associationbetween stock market volatility

and the attractionof an online financial article.

Keywords Stock market volatility, Domain specificity, Sentiment, Headline features,

Online article attraction

Paper type Research paper

1. Introduction

Social media platformsare online applications that help users to find more informationsuch

as, Twitter, YouTube and so on. Social media has developed rapidly in recent years, and

people’s access to information has becomemore diversified. In the field of finance, financial

articles could be associated with investor psychology (Tetlock, 2007). Online financial

information captures the market conversation and actually has the ability to move share

prices. Heimer provides evidencethat social interaction affects individual investors’trading

behavior (Heimer, 2016). Individual investors increasingly rely on online financial

information to evaluate every stock prior to making an investing decision, even though

noise and biases are transmitted via the interactions.Therefore, many investors believe that

online financial information leads to profitable investments. As the number of social media

users grows, financial firms are exploring ways to use social media as a marketing tool to

provide financial information and to interact with investors. As social media has become

more popular, financial practitioners, including retail investors and professional investors,

have increasingly focused more on online financial platforms. Similarly, a large number of

scholars have begunto study online financial platforms.

As the most influential and popular social mediaapplications in China, WeChat attracts

many financial organizations and individuals and has recently become a vibrant online

platform to publish financial articles.On WeChat, financial articles are visible on an official

account or through forwarding from friends in a circle of friends. Users can obtain the

financial informationthey want by subscribing to (i.e. “following”) a specificofficial WeChat

account, which will provide daily financial articles. Compared to the financial information

appearing on other popular social media platforms, the financial articles published on

official WeChat accounts are more professional.Official WeChat financial accounts have not

yet been the subject of academicresearch. This phenomenon can be explained in two ways.

On the one hand, the distinctive features of official WeChat financial accounts make it

difficult for us to transfer conclusions from previous studies on financial articles; on the

other hand, official WeChat accountshave only recently allowed researchers to observe and

obtain information about their financial information diffusion, which was previously

unavailable.

As the number of official financial accounts is growing exponentially on WeChat, large

amounts of financial articles are now available on the platform, competing with each other

to be read. However, the popularity of financialarticles on WeChat is not evenly distributed.

Instead, a small number of articlesdominate the activity on WeChat and receive most of the

attention of investors. Even though the headline is a very small part of an online financial

article, it has a significant impact on the marketing of the article. It is the headline of an

online financial article that catches the attention of investors before the text is read. To

attract and impress readers most favorably, official financial accounts can take full

advantage of the headlines of the articles they publish to attract more investors. However,

what kind of headlineis more attractive is still unknown.

Online

financial

articles

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