The effects of content characteristics on consumer engagement with branded social media content on Facebook

Andrew T. Stephen, Michael R. Sciandra, and J. Jeffrey Inman

This paper addresses the issue of social media content marketing – designing brand content that is shared with consumers via social media - in relation to Facebook and in the context of consumer engagement.

Overview

Social media content marketing—designing brand content that is disseminated to consumers through social media—requires complex decision making, yet marketers lack a systematic understanding of how to design and disseminate content to maximize engagement and related marketing outcomes.

Andrew Stephen, Michael Sciandra, and J. Jeffrey Inman address this problem in the context of branded content on Facebook. They consider two aspects of marketers' decision making: design (i.e., what should each post say and look like?) and dissemination (i.e., to whom should each post be targeted?).

They use a dataset of 4,284 branded Facebook posts made over an 18-month period by...

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