University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Marketing Papers Wharton Faculty Research 1-2018 Advertising Content and Consumer Engagement on Social Media: Evidence from Facebook Dokyun Lee Kartik Hosanagar University of Pennsylvania Harikesh Nair Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/marketing_papers Part of the Advertising and Promotion Management Commons, Business Administration, Management, and Operations Commons, Business Analytics Commons, Business and Corporate Communications Commons, Communication Technology and New Media Commons, Marketing Commons, Mass Communication Commons, Social Media Commons, and the Technology and Innovation Commons Recommended Citation Lee, D., Hosanagar, K., & Nair, H. (2018). Advertising Content and Consumer Engagement on Social Media: Evidence from Facebook. Management Science, http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2902 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/marketing_papers/339 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Advertising Content and Consumer Engagement on Social Media: Evidence from Facebook Abstract We describe the effect of social media advertising content on customer engagement using data from Facebook. We content-code 106,316 Facebook messages across 782 companies, using a combination of Amazon Mechanical Turk and natural language processing algorithms. We use this data set to study the association of various kinds of social media marketing content with user engagement—defined as Likes, comments, shares, and click-throughs—with the messages. We find that inclusion of widely used content related to brand personality—like humor and emotion—is associated with higher levels of consumer engagement (Likes, comments, shares) with a message. We find that directly informative content—like mentions of price and deals—is associated with lower levels of engagement when included in messages in isolation, but higher engagement levels when provided in combination with brand personality–related attributes.