Spreading the word through likes on Facebook

Abstract

Purpose -This research aims to investigate the message strategies most likely to promote online "word-of-mouth" (WOM) activity for business-to-business (B2B)/business-to-consumer as well as product/service Facebook accounts. Design/methodology/approach -Using content analysis and HLM, the authors measure the relationship between three types of message strategies and Facebook message "Likes" by analyzing 1,143 wall post messages of 193 Fortune 500 Facebook accounts. Findings -Research findings suggest that B2B Facebook account posts are more effective if they include corporate brand names and avoid "hard sell" or explicitly commercial statements. Furthermore, results suggest that including emotional sentiments in Facebook posts is a particularly effective social media strategy for B2B and service marketers. Originality/value -This study advances the knowledge of social media and online WOM behavior, as well as B2B and service advertising/communication literature, by relating message content to message popularity. In terms of managerial implications, this research provides explanations and support for the implementation of effective social media message strategies that are likely to promote WOM activity.

“Engage and attract me, then I’ll share you”: an analysis of the impact of post category on viral marketing in a social networking site

“…The main objective in choosing eight different brands was to control the effect of the brand on the dependent variable, a similar procedure used by Kim et al (2015), which controlled product category. The number of posts (2583), covering the period between December 2012 -February 2013, is significantly greater in number than those analyzed in previous studies on Facebook (De Vries et al, 2012;Kim et al, 2015;Sabate et al, 2014;Swani et al, 2013).…”

“…In Facebook specifically posts are one of the items analyzed by researchers. In these cases, studies focus on features of design (interactivity with the user, number of media and text elements, size of post and vividness) and on content -entertainment, both emotional and informational (De Vries et al, 2012;Rauschnabel, Praxmarer, & Ivens, 2012;Swani et al, 2013). The most striking characteristic of the studies which analyze sharing as the dependent variable is that they usually do not attach it to viral marketing.…”

“…Of the studies which categorize posts on Facebook, the grand majority focuses on likes and comments as dependent variables (De Vries et al, 2012;Sabate et al, 2014;Swani et al, 2013). The ones which defined sharing as dependent variable (Kim et al, 2015) did not concentrate on analyzing it as a form of viral marketing.…”

“…Much of this content is published in social media because viral marketing uses a pre-existing social network to spread marketing information via word-of-mouth (WOM) among users of that social network (Yang, Yao, Ma, & Chen, 2010). As a result, research conducted with the help of data from virtual social networks is becoming increasingly common (Cvijikj & Michahelles, 2013;De Vries, Gensler, & Leeflang, 2012;Groeger & Buttle, 2014;Kim, Spiller, & Hettche, 2015;Ransbotham, Kane, & Lurie, 2012;Sabate, Berbegal-Mirabent, Cañabate, & Lebherz, 2014;Schulze, Schöler, & Skiera, 2014;Smith, Fischer, & Yongjian, 2012;Swani, Milne, & Brown, 2013), although authors stress that organizations have not yet been able to measure the effectiveness of strategies based on these environments (Hoffman & Novak, 2012;Kumar, Bhaskaran, Mirchandani, & Shah, 2013).…”

“…In theoretical and empirical terms, this choice was made because, on Facebook, users can spontaneously share the content published in company or brand profiles in their own pages (Zarrella & Zarrella, 2010). Our approach is an important initiative of analyzing viral marketing, as similar studies based on this virtual social network only focus on the options of likes and comments as dependent variables (De Vries et al, 2012;Swani et al, 2013).…”