Engaging Your Feelings: Emotion Contagion and Public Engagement on Nonprofit Organizations’ Facebook Sites

This study investigated nonprofit organizations’ (NPOs) emotion-based content strategies on Facebook and publics’ engagement behaviors. More than 52,000 Facebook posts and corresponding comments were collected from the top 100 NPOs in the United States. The emotion-carrying status and valence of the messages were analyzed with computer-assisted sentiment analysis procedures. Results confirmed emotion-carrying posts and posts with negative emotions led to increased public engagement as indexed by the volumes of likes, shares, and comments. The presence of emotions and valence of the NPOs’ posts were also found to have a diffusion effect on user comments.