Factors Increasing Consumer Engagement of Branded Content in Instagram

Elena Cuevas-Molano,Luis Matosas-Lopez,Cesar Bernal-Bravo

doi:10.1109/access.2021.3121186

Abstract

Companies use social media to foster ongoing relationships with customers. One specific way companies do this is by fostering brand communities through fan pages on social networking sites. These virtual platforms allow consumers to become brand advocates. It also allows brands to generate and increase direct engagement with consumers, which is a key metric to assess brand performance. However, little is known about how different post criteria influences distinct levels of social media engagement. To explore this further, we developed a model to analyze the impact of 31 structural, semantic, and morphological content factors over consumer engagement, measured by the number of likes and comments on 680 brand posts from 14 Instagram fan pages across ten sectors. The results revealed a solid model, with an explanatory power of 73.1% (R2) for likes and 47.5% (R2) for comments. The results also established how content factors influenced different engagement levels; i.e. videos with sound, carousel posts with multiple photos, and posts with hashtags achieved higher engagement levels in terms of likes. Contrarily, graphics, interactive content that involved voting, contests, and questions reached higher engagement with regard to comments. We contribute to academic and practical research this new model to study and implement social media solutions that improve customer engagement as part of an organizations’ marketing and branding strategies. The limitations of this paper relate to the size of the sample and the scope of the reviewed literature.

Highlights

There are 5.6 billion internet users worldwide [1] and 4.3 billion are connected to social media, which is approximately 54.9% of the global population [2]
We studied social media audience behavior based on two media theories: Uses and Gratifications (U&G) theory and Parasocial Interaction (PSI) theory
2) DEPENDENT VARIABLES To analyze consumer engagement (CE) on Instagram brand pages, we started from the academic consensus on its interactive nature, which was measured using the number of likes and comments received by brand posts [20], [50]–[52] and we considered the community size of each fan page according to the formula applied in professional practice to measure social engagement [88]

Summary

Introduction

There are 5.6 billion internet users worldwide [1] and 4.3 billion are connected to social media, which is approximately 54.9% of the global population [2]. A total of 47% of users follow their favorite brands on social networking sites (SNS) [3]. This percentage is higher when countries are analyzed separately. Internet has reconfigured the human socialization processes and empowered consumers in brand relationships [5], [6]. In this context, there is a greater number of consumers connected with brands on social media. There is a greater number of consumers connected with brands on social media This is attractive for companies who identify social media’s potential to foster relationships with consumers and further

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Conclusion