Social media outlets constitute excellent vehicles for fostering relationships with customers. One specific way to do this is to create brand fan pages on social networking sites. Companies can place brand posts (containing videos, messages, quizzes, information, and other material) on these brand fan pages. Customers can become fans of these brand fan pages, and subsequently indicate that they like the brand post or comment on it. This liking and commenting on brand posts reflects brand post popularity. In this article, we determine possible drivers for brand post popularity. We analyze 355 brand posts from 11 international brands spread across six product categories. Results show that positioning the brand post on top of the brand fan page enhances brand post popularity. But the findings also indicate that different drivers influence the number of likes and the number of comments. Namely, vivid and interactive brand post characteristics enhance the number of likes. Moreover, the share of positive comments on a brand post is positively related to the number of likes. The number of comments can be enhanced by the interactive brand post characteristic, a question. The shares of both positive and negative comments are positively related to the number of comments. Managers of brands that operate brand fan pages can be guided by our research with regards to deciding which characteristics or content to place at brand posts.

How can firms retain customers during recessions? To answer this question, we investigate the moderating role of consumer confidence (CC) on the effects of three types of crucial customer loyalty strategies. These strategies are value equity (VE), brand equity (BE), and relationship equity (RE), collectively called customer equity drivers (CEDs). We build on economics and marketing theories to develop our hypotheses on the concerned moderating role. A meta-analysis is used to synthesize the multilevel results of 13 service industries and to test the hypotheses. In addition, we use several robustness checks to validate the findings of the meta-analysis. The results consistently show that CC partly influences the effects of CEDs on customer loyalty and this influence varies across industries. These findings suggest that managers in service industries should consider CC as an important criterion for effectively adjusting customer loyalty strategies to their specific situation. Specifically, during recessions, when CC is relatively low, VE is effective for retaining customers, but this is more apparent for noncontractual settings than for contractual settings. Also, BE is more effective but only for noncontractual firms.

No abstract

This study examines the relative effectiveness of traditional advertising, impressions generated through firm-toconsumer (F2C) messages on Facebook, and the volume and valence of consumer-to-consumer (C2C) messages on Twitter and web forums for brand-building and customer acquisition efforts. The authors apply vector autoregressive modeling to a unique data set from a European telecom firm. This modeling approach allows them to consider the interrelations among traditional advertising, F2C impressions, and volume and valence of C2C social messages. The results show that traditional advertising is most effective for both brand building and customer acquisition. Impressions generated through F2C social messages complement traditional advertising efforts. Thus, thoroughly orchestrating traditional advertising and a firm's social media activities may improve a firm's performance with respect to building the brand and encouraging customer acquisition. Moreover, firms can stimulate the volume and valence of C2C messages through traditional advertising that in turn influences brand building and acquisition. These findings can help managers leverage the different types of messages more adequately.

Purpose This study aims to study to what extent the helpfulness votes others attach to a review affect a consumer’s perceived helpfulness of that review. In addition, the purpose of this study is to investigate whether this social influence moderates the relationships among several content presentation factors and perceived helpfulness. Design/methodology/approach A choice-based conjoint experiment was carried out in which 201 respondents evaluated different reviews and chose the review they perceive as most helpful. Findings Consumers perceive reviews as more (less) helpful in the presence of clearly valenced positive (negative) helpfulness votes. In addition, helpfulness votes of others diminish the positive impact of structure and the negative impact of spelling errors. Research limitations/implications The experimental setup may limit the external validity of the study. Practical implications Providing a helpfulness button gives firms an instrument to offer content that consumers perceive as more useful and to exert some influence on the effects of content presentation factors on the review’s helpfulness. Social implications Consumers tend to follow other consumers’ opinions without forming their own opinion. Firms could misuse this tendency by hiring people to vote on reviews that are not necessarily helpful for consumers, but are helpful for the firm. Originality/value This study is the first to assess the extent to which social influence affects consumers’ evaluation of reviews. Given that consumers use helpfulness votes to distinguish reviews, it is important to understand to what extent these votes reflect the actual helpfulness of the information in the review and to what extent they reflect previous helpfulness votes.