How to Catch Customers' Attention? A Study on the Effectiveness of Brand Social Media Strategies in Digital Customer Engagement.

Xinxin Liu,Decheng Wen,Meng Wang,Yuying Liu

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.800766

Xinxin Liu, Decheng Wen + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.800766

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Abstract

Enterprises often post branded content on social media and adopt a proactive response approach to improve digital customer engagement to gain a competitive advantage. However, there are many brands which fail to operate social media as effectively as expected. The effective use of brand social media strategies to improve digital customer engagement remains an ongoing challenge for the enterprises. Based on firm-generated content theory and social presence theory, this study aims to identify the impact of brand social media strategies on different levels of digital customer engagement, including positive filtering, cognitive and affective processing as well as advocacy from content strategy and response strategy. Based on 1,519 brand posts on the official Weibo pages of eight of the top 500 Chinese brands in 2021, this study uses a multiple linear regression model to examine the impact of brand social media strategies on digital customer engagement and the moderating effects of brand image and discretionary purchases. The findings show that, on the one hand, among the brand social media content strategies, action content strategy is associated with higher levels of digital customer engagement. On the other hand, different brand social media response strategies have a differential impact on digital customer engagement levels, with cohesive response being the best strategy for increasing digital customer engagement level. In addition, the effectiveness of brand social media response strategy in digital customer engagement is further moderated by the brand image and discretionary purchases. In contrast, the effectiveness of brand social media response strategy in digital customer engagement is stronger when the brand image emphasizes its “competence” or the discretionary purchases focus on “material purchases.” This study not only enriches the research on digital customer engagement but also provides a reference for the brand strategy selection, design and management based on social media.

Highlights

In today’s highly connected network environment, the common use of social media is changing the environment for branding
To answer the above key research questions, this study explores the impact of brand social media strategies on digital customer engagement in the following ways: (1) Based on customer engagement theory, this study conducts a comprehensive study of digital customer engagement from hierarchical differences and overall level
(2) Based on the firmgenerated content theory and social presence theory, we focus on investigating the impact of two key brand social media strategies on digital customer engagement, which are content strategy and response strategy, and determine which brand social media strategy is more effective by comparing the level of digital customer engagement

Summary

Introduction

In today’s highly connected network environment, the common use of social media is changing the environment for branding. Eigenraam et al (2018) suggests that digital customer engagement are consumers’ online behavioral manifestations of brand engagement that go beyond purchases. Recent research has shown that digital customer engagement is a key performance metric for evaluating a brand’s social media strategy and has attracted much attention in various research areas (McShane et al, 2021; Shahbaznezhad et al, 2021). Enhanced insights into the effectiveness of brand social media strategies for digital customer engagement contribute to our understanding of this critical area. Different brand images and type of discretionary purchases may influence digital customer engagement, as brand images are associated with media images, and cover various types of content related to the business, which can influence consumers’ brand perceptions or associations. Academic understanding in this area is still relatively scarce, creating an important knowledge gap

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