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

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 social app in China.

By integrating the methods of econometric and text mining, this study analyzed the content of 113,917 headlines published by 126 official accounts from the day account being created to May 12, 2016. Hierarchical regression was used to investigate the effects of headline features, account ownership type and stock market volatility on the attraction of online financial articles.

The empirical results show that sentiment, length, domain specificity and language intensity in a headline are significantly associated 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 significant moderating effects on the relationship between sentiment and online article attraction.

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 just one of the many social media applications that can be used to publish online financial articles, and it differs from other social media applications greatly. This makes 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 articles on different platforms. Second, in mining the characteristics of 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 similarity between the body text and the headline, the theme and the sense of humor. However, the authors believe that these limitations do not have major negative implications for the results and contributions of this study.

From a practical perspective, this work could help official WeChat accounts to write better headlines for the articles they publish to attract more readers and fans and thus improve the value of their accounts, which would enable them to maximize the tangible benefits through differential pricing on advertisement placement.

The contributions of this study are as follows. First, the paper explored how headline sentiment influences article attraction and found that positive sentiment is negatively related to article attraction, while negative sentiment 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 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 association between stock market volatility and the attraction of an online financial article.