Abstract

Formality is defined as a measure of writing style that follows the accepted rules of grammar, punctuation, and spelling. Changes concerning formality around an in-real-life event provide insights into how participants in the social soundtrack react to or perceive aspects of the events. Understanding formality is important as the stylistic aspects of online communication have several implications in many areas (i.e., marketing, management of branding, awareness campaigns). In this study, the authors investigate how the formality of social media conversations regarding an IRL event is affected by the features of user communication on three different social media platforms. To this end, the authors analyze more than 3 million Twitter, 800K Instagram, and 50K Tumblr posts concerning Super Bowl XLIX to measure the degree of language formality in social media conversations. The authors consider three categories with three phases and conduct a panel data regression model with fixed effects to measure the degree of formality based on different contextual attributes of the postings. The panel regression analysis shows that the halftime performance category has the highest formality compared to the other two categories in the Pre and Post phases. No significant category is observed in the During phase related to formality. The results show that the social media platforms and the category influence relative changes in formality.