Negative Tweets and their impact on likelihood to recommend

The advent of customers sharing their negative experiences of brands on microblogs such as Twitter has become a normal part of consumers' interactions with brands on social media. This landscape has resulted in the transformation of customer service departments that closely monitor social media mentions in order to help mitigate the risks posed to their reputations. Little is known however about the impact that these shared negative brand experiences have on the receivers of them. This study seeks to address this gap in knowledge and does so through the operationalization of an online experiment where 372 Twitter users were exposed to negative valence Tweets about airlines. Findings from the experiment reveal that a change in likelihood to recommend the firm takes place upon exposure to negative valence Tweets and that issue involvement, message relevance and emotions felt by receivers after exposure predict whether a change is likely to take place.