Relationship Maintenance on Social Media: An Examination of Personified Brand Characters’ Twitter Accounts

Abstract

The interactive nature of social media provides marketers with better opportunities to have direct conversations with consumers. It thus calls for more strategic management of consumer-brand relationship on social media. The current study focuses on personified brand characters' Twitter accounts and its use in consumer-brand relationship. A content analysis was conducted to explore how the personified brand characters within two industries (insurance and food) maintained their relationships with consumers on Twitter. Five relationship maintenance strategies (positivity, openness, sharing tasks, social networking and assurance) and three message types (informational, socio-emotional, and instrumental) were examined. Results revealed that positivity and openness were adopted by most analyzed brand characters. Informational tweets were used the most, followed by socio-emotional tweets. The insurance industry adopted a higher portion of strategies of openness and sharing tasks as well as informational tweets; while the food industry adopted a higher portion of social networking strategy and socio-emotional tweets. In addition, positivity and assurance were positively correlated to socio-emotional tweets; while openness and social networking were positively correlated to informational tweets.

Variables of Twitter´s brand activity that influence audience spreading behaviour of branded content

“…While emoticons reflect in a clear and synthesized form company's aim to encourage user's participation; lexicon, probably conditioned by Twitter's 140 characters limitation, fall through in the same objective. These findings support the theorizing of Dodoo and Wu (2015) who present the use of emotional content and emoticons in particular, as a suitable way to engage with food industry audiences in Twitter. In addition, text emoticons (unlike other pictographical characters such as emoji's) can be displayed by any smartphone or tablet increasing probability of these symbols to be seeing by any audience.…”

“…In this population of 45 Twitter accounts, the researcher gathers all the content posted by the brands (Original Tweets, Genuine Replies and Retweets done), in a oneyear period, from the 4 th of February of 2015 till the 4 th of February of 2016. The data collection for the research is performed using Twitter's service provider Twittonomy (Diginomy Pty Ltd, 2013). A total number of 41.392 pieces of brand-related content were retrieved, besides the effect caused by every single post on brand audience, in terms of Retweets or Favorites.…”

Brand anthropomorphism on Twitter: communication strategies and consumer engagement

“…Message type comprises three categories (Dodoo and Wu, 2015; Knight and Carpenter, 2012; Rui et al , 2013). An informational message refers to a tweet that presents brand-related or other information, such as information about a new product and event.…”

“…In order to achieve a 95% confidence level and a 3% confidence interval, we randomly selected 1,100 tweets and coded the message type and dialogic principle of each tweet. Message type comprises three categories (Dodoo and Wu, 2015;Knight and Carpenter, 2012;Rui et al, 2013). An informational message refers to a tweet that presents brandrelated or other information, such as information about a new product and event.…”