Journal of Emerging Trends in Marketing and Management (May 2023)
Using the Right Content on Social Media to Enhance Consumer Engagement
Abstract
Online marketing covers a significant portion of what a brand's promotion strategy means today. Whether the focus is on the organic side of online marketing or the paid one, promotional efforts must be viewed with the same level of importance in building an effective campaign that generates controllable results. The choice of online promotion channels, where a company's potential customers spend their time, as well as the differentiation in types of content that can be uploaded play a significant role in determining consumers to actively engage with the respective brand. Authors from the specialized literature have conflicting opinions regarding the effectiveness of the various types of content uploaded by brands on their social media pages. Thus, there is the need of evaluating the effectiveness of the main existing content categories (informational, remunerative, entertainment and relational), as well as identifying that content that determines certain behaviors among online users, respectively changes in their level of interaction with a brand. To solve such a decision-making problem, we have conducted two direct researches. The first was a marketing experiment, on the Facebook and Instagram pages of a coffee shop, in order to determine the level of engagement users have based on the content type. We have made 12 social media posts, based on content type, length of the description text, the day of the week and the period of the day in which they were made public. The second research was a survey among the social media users following the coffee shop accounts, in order to evaluate the consumer’s opinion about the above-mentioned types of content. Comparing the results of the 2 researches, we have identified both correlations and certain existing contradictions between consumers’ actual behavior in the online environment and the preferences they state regarding the posts with which they are most likely to interact.
