Publication on Social Media Brand Engagement

Publication on Social Media Brand Engagement

In a paper published in the Journal of Business Research (AJG: 3), Tobias Schäfers, Associate Professor at the Department of Marketing, and co-authors examine the effects of consumers’ social media brand engagement on brand-related outcomes.

Increasing consumer engagement is a cornerstone of companies’ social media efforts. However, how social media brand engagement behavior affects brand performance remains largely unexplored. The authors examine social media engagement along two dimensions – volume and variety – and measure brand performance using consumers’ brand attachment, attitudes, and purchase intentions. Based on the power law of practice and combining survey measures with social media data, the analyses reveal a diminishing marginal utility of engagement volume, as the positive impact of engagement behavior on brand outcomes declines at higher levels of engagement volume. However, the variation across performed activities attenuates these diminishing returns on engagement volume. Across two studies with 1,347 consumers who interacted with different brands, there is consistent evidence for these effects. The results question companies’ often unidimensional focus on increasing engagement volume. Instead, the findings suggest that to maximize brand performance on social media platforms, companies should also encourage engagement variety.

The paper is co-authored by Tobias Schäfers, Tomas Falk, who is a professor of Marketing at Aalto University in Finland, Ashish Kumar, Senior Lecturer at RMIT University Melbourne in Australia, and Julia Schamari, Chief Operating Officer at Make Relations in Frankfurt, Germany.

Free access to the paper is provided by Elsevier until August 17 via the following link: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1dJYE_3NpAz1XU