What messages to post? Evaluating the popularity of social media communications in business versus consumer markets ☆

By K. Swani, George R. Milne, Brian P. Brown, A. Assaf, Naveen Donthu. 2017

293 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Although social media usage in business markets continues to grow, managers still struggle with designing popular brand message posts. This research investigates the key factors that contribute to Facebook brand content popularity metrics (i.e., number of likes and comments) for Fortune 500 companies' brand posts in business-to-business (B2B) versus business-to-consumer (B2C) markets. Building on psychological motivation theory, the authors examine key differences in B2B and B2C social media message strategies in terms of branding, message appeals, selling, and information search. Using Bayesian models, they find noteworthy differences in the propensity of viewers to popularize brand posts. Specifically, the results indicate that the inclusion of corporate brand names, functional and emotional appeals, and information search cues increases the popularity of B2B messages compared with B2C messages. Moreover, viewers of B2B content demonstrate a higher message liking rate but a lower message commenting rate than viewers of B2C content.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/98f0669b96b55fa1346152c6ba6696c0f5b27918

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Citations in the corpus

Understanding consumers’ social media engagement behaviour: An examination of the moderation effect of social media context (2021, unknown): “Swani et al. (2017) provide insights into the management of the content trustworthiness of SMM, suggesting that social media marketers use product brand names, emotional appeals, and direct-calls-to-purchase in their B2C Facebook posts to engage end-users with Facebook "likes" and "comments";…”
Social media in marketing: A review and analysis of the existing literature (2017, background): “Such growing interest could be returned to the high level of attractiveness and interactivity existing in social media platforms (Swani et al., 2016; Wu, 2016).”
Evaluating Facebook brand content popularity for service versus goods offerings (2017, background): “…Shannon &Weaver, 1949; Yadav & Pavlou, 2014) to understand how consumers process and respond to social media brand posts and rely on WOM psychological motivation theory to argue that saliency of motivations to transmit content instigates brand post popularity (Berger, 2014; Swani et al., 2017).”