Proposing to your fans: Which brand post characteristics drive consumer engagement activities on social media brand pages?

Directly engaging consumers with brand messages (posts) is one advantage of social networking sites. Using consumer engagement as a theoretical framework, the current study analyzes consumer engagement activities with brand posts, taking into account post characteristics, such as vividness, interactivity, content, and publication timing, while also controlling for post length, number of fans, and industry differences. The study identifies differences across different consumer engagement activities and industries. As such, vivid post characteristics yields mixed results, whereas post interactivity has a mainly positive effect on social interactions. If content categories address only some portion of the target audience, they negatively affect post interaction, compared to the baseline category. In terms of post publication, time at the top of the brand page increases the number of interactions, whereas weekday versus weekend has no effect on consumer engagement behavior. The findings challenge research and practice alike to account for these important differences. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.