The Effects Of Content Characteristics On Consumer Engagement With Branded Social Media Content On Facebook

Social media content marketing, which involves brands designing content that is disseminated to consumers through social media, involves complex decision-making. This research uses a dataset of 4,284 branded Facebook posts made over an 18-month period by nine brands across four industries to understand how marketers’ social media content design decisions influence multiple measurable “engagement” outcomes that are theoretically meaningful and of interest to marketers (e.g., how many “likes” or “shares” posts receive, or how many website traffic referrals are made). A typology of fourteen social media content characteristics is developed and a conceptual framework linking them to engagement is proposed and empirically tested. The increasingly common practice of brands paying to boost post reach on Facebook, which results in posts being seen by a wider (but possibly less relevant) audience, is also considered in the framework, although findings suggest that this is less important than content design. Empirically, many content characteristics are found to be important drivers of engagement, with the most important being related to persuasion. Contrary to marketing content in traditional channels (e.g., advertisements), for branded social media content consumers appear to dislike and react against overt persuasion attempts in the form of advertising-style messages.