A Study On The Factors Influencing The Helpfulness Of Online Reviews On Social Platform

With the popularity of the Internet and the rise of social networks,online reviews have become an important basis for users’ emotional perception and purchase decisions.In this process,users increasingly focus on the satisfaction of affective needs,such as entertainment,interest,and social interaction,and put information needs,such as news,information,and shopping decisions,on the back burner.However,previous studies have mainly focused on e-commerce platforms and explored the mechanism of online review helpfulness on consumers’ purchase intentions and decisions,ignoring its importance in satisfying users’ emotional needs.Therefore,it is important to investigate the factors influencing the helpfulness of online reviews on social platforms for research value.Based on Elaboration Likelihood Model and Information Adoption Model,this paper proposes research hypotheses and establishes models in two dimensions of information quality(review content characteristics)and information source reliability(reviewer characteristics)to study the factors influencing the helpfulness of online reviews on social platforms.In this study,a total of 5553 online review data are collected with Douban short reviews,in which the main indicators include review text,star rating,reviewer professionalism,and reviewer inward centrality.This paper uses the Hownet sentiment dictionary to determine the sentiment tendency of the review texts and to check the consistency with the star ratings.In addition,the interaction between inconsistent ratings and other influencing factors is also explored.To address the characteristics of the sample data,a zero-inflated negative binomial regression model is fitted to the data,and the robustness of the fitted results is tested using the negative binomial regression model.The results show that review length,review readability,reviewer professionalism,and inward centrality all confirm positive effects on review helpfulness;reviewer outward centrality has a negative effect on review helpfulness,which may be due to social pressure reducing the helpfulness of subordinate reviews;affective tendency consistency and rating inconsistency positively affect review helpfulness,and negative affective tendency review helpfulness is perceived higher.This study also confirms that increased rating inconsistency diminishes the positive effects of reviewer professionalism,reviewer inward centrality,and affective tendency consistency on review helpfulness.This study further refines the research framework of review helpfulness from a social platform perspective and comprehensively discusses the factors influencing online review helpfulness on social platforms.Combined with the practical context,this study proposes feasible suggestions from the perspective of review helpfulness,providing valuable references for social platform management and practice.