The Impact of Brand Actions on Facebook on the Consumer Mind-Set

Abstract

Despite all the surrounding hype, it is still not clear exactly how social media affects consumer behavior. In an effort to contribute to the current debate on the effectiveness of social media marketing this study aims to theorize and empirically demonstrate how brand’s social media efforts influence a wide array of consumer mind-set metrics that underlie the consumer purchase decision-making process. Specifically, we relate key dimensions of a brand’s social media actions (intensity, valence and richness) to well established consumer mind-set metrics ranging from awareness through attitude to satisfaction. We hypothesize that brand actions’ intensity (more brand posts) with neutral valence and richer content will have a strong impact on the consumer mind-set. Using a unique data set that captures both social media and consumer mind-set metrics for multiple brands, we propose empirically testing our model with panel vector auto regression.