Abstract

Introduction

Conceptual framework

Data and model development

Results

Managerial implications

Conclusions and future research

Notes

References

Acknowledgements

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Abstract

Brands allocate their social media advertising across multiple platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. Because consumers use multiple social media, brand communications on one platform could generate engagement within the same platform (direct effects) and potentially impact engagement with the brand on the other platforms (spillover effects). Additionally, past engagement with a post on a platform could sustain into the future, thereby improving the longevity of posts (carryover effects). These effects could also vary across platforms. Drawing on recent advertising literature, the authors propose and test differential carryover, spillover, and direct effects within and across social media. The empirical analysis indicates that these effects exist and are significant, supporting the propositions presented. The analysis provides generalizable guidelines to social media marketers on the effectiveness of the various platforms at sustaining a post and at creating direct and spillover effects across other platforms. Finally, the study also exemplifies a resource allocation model for brands to use when allocating their efforts across the various social media platforms to maximize both consumer engagement and the firm’s return on social media investment.

Introduction

Consumers engage with brand communications across multiple social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. To manage these engagements, brands employ a multi-platform social media strategy where they create and distribute branded content for and across these multiple platforms. Often consumer engagement with content posted on one of these platforms impacts engagement with the brand on the other platforms. For example, Fig. 1 shows how Disney’s post on Facebook or YouTube could lead to engagement with the brand’s page, “handle,” or content on Twitter (see Fig. 1).

Prior research in marketing has shown that multi-channel marketing influences behavior both within a single channel as well as across channels. For example, several studies observe spillover effects of advertising across multiple media (Assael 2011; Naik and Raman 2003; Naik and Peters 2009; Sridhar et al. 2011) when brands use more than one medium to advertise. These spillovers are found to augment the direct media effects and affect multiple outcomes of brand interest such as awareness, brand value, and sales. Thus the influence of brand communications initiated in one medium carries over to other media (similar to an echo) and can have prolonged impact in the other media in the subsequent periods, i.e., past engagement affects future engagements (Hewett et al. 2016). Even though this effect has been established across media and digital ad platforms (Bruce, Murthi and Rao 2017), to the best of our knowledge, no study explores such interdependencies across multiple social media platforms in the brand’s portfolio.