Message content features and social media engagement: evidence from the media industry

Abstract

Purpose This paper aims to uncover the drivers of consumer-brand engagement on Facebook, understood here as users’ behavioral responses in the form of clicks, likes, shares and comments. We highlight which content components, interactivity cues (calls to action [CTA]) and media richness (e.g. video, photo and text) are most effective at inducing consumers to exhibit clicking, liking, commenting and sharing behaviors toward branded content. Design/methodology/approach This study analyzes 757 Facebook-based brand posts from a media and entertainment brand over a 15-week period. It investigates the relationship between interactive cues and media richness with consumer engagement using a negative binomial model. Findings Results show positive relationships for both interactivity cues and media richness content components on increasing consumer-brand engagement outcomes. The findings add clarity to previous inconsistent findings in the marketing literature. CTAs enhance all four engagement behaviors. Media richness also strongly influences all engagement behaviors, with visual imagery (photos and videos) attracting the most consumer responses. Research limitations/implications The sampled posts pertain to one brand (a radio station) and are thus concentrated within the media/entertainment industry, which limits the generalizability of findings. In addition, the authors limit their focus to Facebook but recognize that findings may differ across more visual or textual social networking sites. Practical implications The authors uncover the most effective pairings of media richness and interactivity components to trigger marketer-desired, behavioral responses. For sharing, for example, the authors show that photo-based posts are more effective on average than video-based posts. The authors also show that including an interactive call to act to encourage one type of engagement behavior has a near-universal effect in increasing all engagement behaviors. Originality/value This study takes two widely used concepts within the communications and advertising literatures – interactivity cues and media richness – and tests their relationship with engagement using real and actual users’ data available via Facebook Insights. This method is more robust than surveys or wall scrapping, as it mitigates Facebook’s algorithm effect. The results produce more consistent relationships than previous content marketing studies to date.

Incentives for Social Media Users’ Engagement to Different Brand-Related Content Types

“…Given the limited research on contributing intentions (like, comment, share) to different types of brand-related content on social media, the present analysis contributes to a greater understanding of what stimulates social media users to contribute to brand-related activities. Additionally, this research study contributes to the growing body of research that focuses on the brand-related content type on social media (Karpinska-Krakowiak and Modlinski, 2018, Vargo, 2016, Moran et al, 2019 by analyzing the content from different perspectives, to be precise, by analyzing lifestyle, commercial messages and personal opinions, following the perspective used by Fu et al (2017). The results of this study enriches the previous literature by highlighting the significant influence of communal incentives on intentions to contribute to brand-related content on social media.…”

“…Vargo (2016) empirically proved that content type of brand-related posts has a significant effect on number of retweets and likes, while de Vries et al (2012) suggested that the content of brand post is one of the factors driving brand post popularity. Moreover, the research studies of Cvijikj and Michahelles (2013), Karpinska-Krakowiak and Modlinski (2020), Moran et al (2019), Luarn et al (2015) indicated that content type of brand posts is a significant factor for all measures of engagement (liking, commenting and sharing) on social media, applying diverse classifications of content type. Similarly, Fu et al (2017) stated that share intentions of social media users are subject to content type.…”

Mapping methods of research on consumer engagement with brands on social media: A literature review

“…Similarly, Antoniadis et al (2019) attempt to explore new ways of analysing the social interactions by including analysis of the Facebook 'reaction buttons'. A complementary perspective on consumer interactions analysed by the public social media metrics offer studies employing industry data (Gavilanes et al, 2018;Lee et al, 2018;Moran et al, 2019). In these studies, additional behavioural features, such as clicks and click-throughs, are considered as a measure of attention given to a post.…”

“…The studies explore relationships between various post types (Vargo, 2016), post characteristics, such as vividness, interactivity (Schultz, 2017) or content characteristic, such as brand personality (Lee et al, 2018) and behavioural interactions as captured by the social media metrics including likes, comments and shares. In comparison to studies that take a single post as a unit of analysis, Tafesse (2016) A complementary perspective on consumer interactions analysed by the public social media metrics offer studies employing industry data (Gavilanes et al, 2018;Lee et al, 2018;Moran et al, 2019). In these studies, additional behavioural features, such as clicks and click-throughs, are considered as a measure of attention given to a post.…”

“…In these studies, additional behavioural features, such as clicks and click-throughs, are considered as a measure of attention given to a post. Given the nature and level of detail of industry data, the studies can present large-scale analysis (Lee et al, 2018) and longitudinal studies (Gavilanes et al, 2018;Moran et al, 2019).…”