What motivates consumer to engage in microblogs? The roles of brand post characteristics and brand prestige

Abstract

Microblogs have gained concerns from both academics and practitioners owing to their great potential for communication and diffusion. Brand managers can release posts containing photo, video, and hashtags besides a short text on microblog platforms. This study concentrates on the influence of explicit characteristics in brand post (i.e., photo, video, hashtags, and brand personality traits) on consumer engagement (i.e., number of likes, comments, and shares of brand post). Furthermore, we propose that brand prestige moderates the relationships between brand post characteristics and consumer engagement. We examine these hypotheses with a dataset that includes more than 250,000 brand posts across about 70 brands’ official accounts collected from the platform Sina Weibo, the largest and most popular microblog platform in China. Our research yields interesting findings that uncover the relationships among different characteristics of brand post and consumer engagement under different levels of brand prestige. We conclude the paper by highlighting its theoretical and practical contributions.