A picture’s worth a thousand shares: An empirical analysis of logo sizes in social media posts and their impact on content virality

Abstract

Social media marketing is an established promotion strategy that offers firms extensive opportunities to nurture brand equity and to disseminate product information. Therefore, it is crucial for firms to create content with significant potential for virality. However, understanding the elements that make certain content more viral than others, especially regarding unstructured data such as images, is not straightforward to marketers. Using data collected from the Twitter API of 54 major fashion brands over 55 months, we investigated how image factors—particularly the size of brands’ logos in posted images—influence the virality of social media content. Our findings suggest that larger logos in posted images correspond to a greater number of retweets for midtier fashion brands. However, we find an opposite effect for top-tier brands—the smaller the logo, the greater the number of retweets. Bottom-tier brands also benefit from larger logos, but the impact is significantly less pronounced compared with midtier brands. These results present significant implications for viral marketing as well as the design of social media content.