Online engagement factors on Facebook brand pages Irena Pletikosa Cvijikj & Florian Michahelles Social Network Analysis and Mining ISSN 1869-5450 Soc. Netw. Anal. Min. DOI 10.1007/s13278-013-0098-8 1 23 Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Springer- Verlag Wien. This e-offprint is for personal use only and shall not be self-archived in electronic repositories. If you wish to self- archive your work, please use the accepted author’s version for posting to your own website or your institution’s repository. You may further deposit the accepted author’s version on a funder’s repository at a funder’s request, provided it is not made publicly available until 12 months after publication. 1 23 Author's personal copy Soc. Netw. Anal. Min. DOI 10.1007/s13278-013-0098-8 ORIGINAL ARTICLE Online engagement factors on Facebook brand pages Irena Pletikosa Cvijikj • Florian Michahelles Received: 19 April 2012 / Revised: 14 September 2012 / Accepted: 16 January 2013 Ó Springer-Verlag Wien 2013 Abstract Social networks have become an additional 1 Introduction marketing channel that could be integrated with the tradi- tional ones as a part of the marketing mix. The change in Marketing has recently undergone significant changes in the dynamics of the marketing interchange between com- the way information is delivered to the customers (Man- panies and consumers as introduced by social networks has gold and Faulds 2009). Social networks (SN), as a part of placed a focus on the non-transactional customer behavior. Web 2.0 technology, provide the technological platform for In this new marketing era, the terms engagement and the individuals to connect, produce and share content participation became the central non-transactional con- online (Boyd and Ellison 2008). As such, for brand owners, structs, used to describe the nature of participants’ specific they offer the potential for (1) advertising—by facilitating interactions and/or interactive experiences. These changes viral marketing, (2) product development—by involving imposed challenges to the traditional one-way marketing, consumers in the design process, and (3) market intelli- resulting in companies experimenting with many different gence—by observing and analyzing the user generated approaches, thus shaping a successful social media content (UGC) (Richter et al. 2011). approach based on the trial-and-error experiences. To The rise and continued growth of SNs have attracted the provide insights to practitioners willing to utilize social interest of companies who see the potential to transmit their networks for marketing purposes, our study analyzes the marketing messages to the customers and enter into a influencing factors in terms of characteristics of the content dialogue with them using the word-of-mouth (WOM) communicated by the company, such as media type, con- principles. They have evolved their customer approach, tent type, posting day and time, over the level of online shifting from traditional one-to-many communication to a customer engagement measured by number of likes, com- one-to-one approach and offering contact or assistance at ments and shares, and interaction duration for the domain any time through SNs such as Facebook, Twitter, My- of a Facebook brand page. Our results show that there is a Space, etc. (Hanna et al. 2011). Using Facebook as an different effect of the analyzed factors over individual example, this means that companies set up and moderate a engagement measures. We discuss the implications of our Facebook brand page, while continuously monitoring the findings for social media marketing. consumers’ activities. As an outcome of this change in the field of marketing, a new phenomenon, generally known as Keywords Social networks Á Facebook Á Social media social media marketing (SMM) was introduced. marketing Á Online engagement Á Interaction Social media marketing, a form of WOM marketing, but also known as viral marketing, buzz, and guerilla market- ing is the intentional influencing of consumer-to-consumer & I. Pletikosa Cvijikj ( ) Á F. Michahelles communication through professional marketing techniques Information Management, ETH Zu¨rich, Weinbergstrasse 56/58, 8092 Zurich, Switzerland (Kozinets et al. 2010). This is not to be seen as a e-mail: [email protected] replacement for the traditional marketing techniques but F. Michahelles rather as an additional marketing channel that could be e-mail: [email protected] integrated with the traditional ones as a part of the 123 Author's personal copy I. Pletikosa Cvijikj, F. Michahelles marketing mix. The advantage of this new electronic writing, Facebook is the largest SN with more than 955 channel is that it can be used to communicate globally and million active users (Facebook 2012a) and the most visited to enrich marketing toward consumers at the personal level page on Internet (Alexa 2012). (Mangold and Faulds 2009). Through users’ feedback or by Social networks and Facebook have been studied from observing conversations on social media, a company can different perspectives such as the network structure (Caci learn about customers’ needs, potentially leading to et al. 2012), characteristics of the users (Bhattacharyya involvement of members of the community in the co-cre- et al. 2011; Hargittai 2007; Karl et al. 2010), usage patterns ation of value through the generation of ideas (Palmer and (Golder et al. 2007; Lampe et al. 2006), usage motivations Koenig-Lewis 2009). (Joinson 2008; Raacke and Bonds-Raacke 2008), identity Despite the general popularity, viral marketing on SNs management and self-presentation (Labrecque et al. 2011; has not yet reached the high expectations set (Clemons Zhao et al. 2008), social interactions (Kostakos and et al. 2007). Although many SMM channels have already Venkatanathan 2010; Nazir et al. 2008), and privacy and been created, how these channels are being used, what their information disclosure (Debatin et al. 2009; Krasnova et al. potential is and how consumers interact remains largely 2009). In addition, specific usage contexts were analyzed, unknown. A structured, academic analysis in this field is such as utilization of SN for knowledge exchange in aca- still outstanding and has yet to be addressed from different demia (Ferri et al. 2012), the value of SNs for politics perspectives (Richter et al. 2011). environment (Stieglitz and Dang-Xuan 2012), etc. How- To contribute in this direction, in this paper we analyze ever, little has been published about the use of SNs in the the factors that influence the level of online customer context of companies, though SNs can be applied in three engagement on SMM channels. We focus on two basic distinct areas: ‘‘(1) recruiting and professional career elements of the company’s engagement plan: (1) which development, (2) relationship facilitation in distributed content should be posted to trigger higher level of online work contexts, and (3) business-to-customer interactions’’ engagement and (2) when the content should be posted. To (Richter et al. 2011). It is the business-to-customer (B2C) answer these questions, we evaluate the effect of the con- interactions on SN platforms that are in the focus of this tent characteristics, such as (1) media type, (2) content paper. type, (3) day and (4) time of posting, over the level of online engagement on a Facebook brand page. We measure 2.2 Brand communities and consumer engagement the engagement level through (1) the number of likes over the content created by the company, (2) number of com- Social networks represent a natural technological platform ments, (3) number of shares and (4) interaction duration. for marketing, providing access to a large number of users, The continuation of this paper is structured as follows: grouped in non-geographically bound communities, based Section 2 provides an overview of the related work. Sec- on a structured set of social relationships among admirers tion 3 introduces the concept of a Facebook brand page. of a brand, i.e. brand communities (Muniz and O’Guinn Section 4 constructs the conceptual framework and derives 2001). the hypotheses. Section 5 describes the used methodology. Brand communities were found to be a successful tool The results of the analysis are presented in Sect. 6, while for increasing sales (Adjei et al. 2010; Bagozzi and Sect. 7 discusses the findings and draws implications for Dholakia 2006). In addition, they have the potential of practitioners. We conclude the paper with Sect. 8. improving the relationship between the consumers and the brand (Sicilia and Palazon 2008) and may influence mem- bers’ perceptions and actions (Muniz and Schau 2007). 2 Related work Brand communities facilitate interactions through exchange of opinions about the brand or a particular 2.1 Social networks product among consumers, thus engaging their members in a form of WOM communication (McAlexander et al. A SN can be defined as ‘‘web-based services that allow 2002). WOM was found to be a powerful tool for mar- individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile keting, frequently used by individuals as a source of brand within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users or product-related information (Buttle 1998; Duana et al. with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and 2008). As such it plays a significant role for increasing the traverse their list of connections and those made by others brand commitment and purchase decision making (Harri- within the system’’ (Boyd and Ellison 2008). Since their son-Walker 2001; Richins and Root-Shaffer 1988), leading introduction in 1997 with SixDegrees.com, SNs have ultimately towards increase in sales (Godes and Mayzlin attracted millions of users, becoming an integral part of 2004). Moreover, many-to-many communication on social their daily routines (Richter et al. 2011). At the time of media platforms is characterized with exponential growth 123 Author's personal copy Online engagement factors on Facebook brand pages of the WOM volume.