Impact of humour on firm-initiated social media conversations

Abstract

Customer engagement is seen as a central measure of marketing effectiveness on social media; yet, very little is known about the factors that drive it. This research focuses on message characteristics and more specifically the role of humour in encouraging likes, comments and reposts. Based on a sample of firm-initiated Weibo posts by a Chinese provincial destination marketing organization, it investigates whether humorous messages overall are more effective, and specifically whether image-based humour is more effective than text-based humour. It also considers whether a message contains a product focus and is complex in terms of its length, lexical density and inclusion of multimodal elements. The findings confirm the proposed influence of humour (with picture-based humour particularly effective), but suggest an even stronger impact of non-product related contents and also indicate that message simplicity is important for eliciting customer engagement.