The effect of image richness on customer engagement: Evidence from Sina Weibo

Abstract

Despite the dominant role of images on social platforms, the research on evaluating visual content is limited in marketing literature. We innovatively proposed using image richness to measure the visual contents by adopting a deep learning algorithm. We collected images embedded in posts by influencers from Sina Weibo and investigated how image richness affects customer engagement. Results show that image richness is positively related with emotional engagement and behavioral engagement, while negatively connected with cognitive engagement. Further, we find that the effect of image richness on customer engagement is more pronounced for experience goods and posters with greater social influence. However, the relationship is weakened by posts' text length, especially for emotional and cognitive engagement. Our paper enriches the literature on the effectiveness of visual content and advances the understanding of customer engagement on social media platforms. These results also shed light on implementing social marketing strategies with images.