Consumers’ Sentiments and Popularity of Brand Posts in Social Media : The Moderating Role of Up-votes

User-generated contents (UGC) on online social media plays an important role in the branding and marketing of firms’ products and services. In this study, we examine the effect of consumers’ sentiments embedded in UGC on the popularity of brand posts. We retrieved real-world data from a social media platform and utilized a rigorous data analysis method that exploited state-of-the-art semi-supervised sentiment analysis technique. Our empirical findings confirm that positive and negative sentiments are associated with post popularity to some extent. Also, the customers’ up-votes for negative comments somehow moderates the effect of negative comments on post popularity. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that demonstrates the specific role of up-votes in enhancing the popularity of brand posts on online social media. Our findings provide a promising theoretical contribution to the literature. The managerial implication is that firms can apply our findings to develop more effective strategies for marketing through social media brand communities.