Causal Effects of Brevity on Style and Success in Social Media

Abstract: In online communities, where billions of people strive to propagate their messages, understanding how wording affects success is of primary importance. In this work, we are interested in one particularly salient aspect of wording: brevity. What is the causal effect of brevity on message success? What are the linguistic traits of brevity? When is brevity beneficial, and when is it not? Whereas most prior work has studied the effect of wording on style and success in observational setups, we conduct a controlled experiment, in which crowd workers shorten social media posts to prescribed target lengths and other crowd workers subsequently rate the original and shortened versions. This allows us to isolate the causal effect of brevity on the success of a message. We find that concise messages are on average more successful than the original messages up to a length reduction of 30-40%. The optimal reduction is on average between 10% and 20%. The observed effect is robust across different subpopulations of raters and is the strongest for raters who visit social media on a daily basis. Finally, we discover unique linguistic and content traits of brevity and correlate them with the measured probability of success in order to distinguish effective from ineffective shortening strategies. Overall, our findings are important for developing a better understanding of the effect of brevity on the success of messages in online social media.