Kit és mire motiválnak a motivációs üzenetek?
The Role of Motivational Messages in Online Communication

Summary/Abstract: Motivational messages combining images andtexts represent a signifi cant portion of content shared on Facebook. Typically, these image-text combinations comprise a quotation and an appropriate picture,and their declared aim is to inspire contemplation in the reader or provide spiritual support for them (and thus propagate content in social media). The studyis primarily concerned with three hypotheses and set out to test them by means of a survey and content analysis. (1) The veracity and original source of suchmessages are diffi cult, if not impossible, to check. This asymmetry in information, which could well be regarded as a manipulative strategy, puts the userwho creates the image-text into a dominant or even opinion-leader position. The poster thus becomes an infl uencer who may use this power to infl uencethe thoughts, opinion, emotions, behaviour of others in a way that the target person is not aware of the infl uence. This hypothesis has been proven. (2) Theexperts of online content production always underline that verbal and visual storytelling is key to success. This examination, however, showed that postingverbal and visual banalities online can also be an eff ective strategy with a viral outcome under certain circumstances or in a specifi c target group, which clearlybreaches a fundamental principle of creating online content. This is evidently a novelty in web content creation. (3) It was assumed that the image componentof motivational messages has an equally strong impact on the audience as the quoted/created text. This assumption has also proven false: the audience ofmotivational messages only expect the images to be aesthetically pleasing and partly relevant for the text.

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