Rebecca Dolan

Social media engagement behaviour: a uses and gratifications perspective

The proliferation of social media platforms and corresponding consumer adoption in recent years has precipitated a paradigm shift, significantly altering the ways customers engage with brands. Organisations recognise the social and network value of engagement within social media, and practitioners are endeavouring to build engagement through their social media content. However, theoretically based academic guidance concerning marketing practice and engagement in new media social networks is limited. This article provides a theoretical model to explicate the role of social media content in facilitating engagement behaviour within a social media context. Based on uses and gratifications theory, it provides a model for how an organisation can stimulate positively valenced engagement behaviour through social media and dissuade negatively valenced engagement behaviour in this forum. A typology of social media engagement behaviour is proposed and a series of hypotheses exploring the relationships between social media content and engagement behaviour are presented.

Social media: communication strategies, engagement and future research directions

This study aims to use social media data to identify brand communication strategies on Facebook. The analysis uncovers trends and statistics regarding engagement rates. This research leads to the development of a future research agenda for social media and engagement research.,The Facebook Insights data of 12 wine brands over a 12-month period informed this study. Descriptive analysis was undertaken to examine the social media communication strategies of these brands. The impact of these strategies on engagement metrics is also examined.,The findings demonstrate a low rate of engagement among the users of the wine brand Facebook pages. A majority of Facebook fans rarely engage with the brands. The results demonstrate that user engagement varies depending on the day of the week and hour of the day of the brand post.,Wine brands can use these findings as a guideline for effective practice and as a benchmarking tool for assessing their social media performance. The paper provides implications for marketing scholars through the development of a future research agenda related to social media, customer engagement and wine marketing.,This paper fulfils an identified need by offering practical advice to wine producers on the necessity to explore and understand social media strategy and customer engagement characteristics.

The Power of Facebook and Instagram Fans: An Exploration of Fan Comments and Their Effect on Social Media Content Strategy.

Organizations continue to invest in marketing strategies through various social media platforms in order to enhance engagement. Building engagement is said to help companies to gain more profit and contribute to their social responsibility (Du et al. 2010). Users follow companies for access to coupons, deals and events. Users like, retweet and share posts, and can recommend the company to family or friends via WOM. Understanding the drivers, process and importance of social media engagement behavior is highly relevant for social media managers. Their inferences are critical for the establishment of effective customer relationship, which directly affect the company’s revenue. In this study, we examine the effect of user’s comments, and the sentiment of these comments, on firms’ social media content strategies. Previous research has demonstrated that engagement can be stimulated by firm strategies, however we consider a more dynamic relationship through the exploration of how firm strategy can be driven by social media engagement, and more specifically user comments. In doing so, this model contributes to a deeper understanding of the dyadic relationship between firm social media strategy and social media engagement.