Social Media Strategy in Services: The Effect of Airline Brand Posts on Engagement

Abstract

Service firms are investing heavily in social media to improve user engagement and consequently firm profitability (Shahbaznezhad et al., 2015a). The interactive capability of brand posts, coupled with their ability to support multiple media types provides marketers with an unprecedented scope to experiment with a variety of marketing messages (Ashley et al., 2015). This paper presents a conceptual framework that explores three overarching brand post strategies; informational, interactional, and transformational, including 12 specific brand post elements as conceptualised by Tafesse and Wein (2016), and conceptualises their effect on social media engagement. We compare the digital strategy of service firms across multiple engagement platforms. Previous research has demonstrated that engagement rates with brands on social media are low (Dolan et al., 2016a; Nelson-Field et al., 2012), and hence this model will contribute to a deeper understanding of exactly how online engagement can be strategically developed.