Abstract

۱٫ Introduction

۲٫ Consumers’ social media brand engagement behavior

۳٫ Hypotheses development

۴٫ Overview of studies

۵٫ Study 1: Diminishing marginal utility of engagement volume

۶٫ Study 2: Interaction of engagement volume and variety

۷٫ Conclusion

Declaration of Competing Interest

References

Abstract

     Increasing consumer engagement is a cornerstone of companies’ social media efforts. However, how social media brand engagement behavior affects brand performance remains largely unexplored. We capture engagement along two dimensions – volume and variety – and measure brand performance using consumers’ brand attachment, attitudes, and purchase intentions. Based on the power law of practice and combining survey measures with social media data, our analyses reveal a diminishing marginal utility of engagement volume, as the positive impact of engagement behavior on brand outcomes declines at higher engagement levels. However, the variation across performed activities attenuates these diminishing returns on engagement volume. We find consistent evidence for these effects across two studies with 1347 consumers who interacted with different brands. The results question companies’ often unidimensional focus on increasing engagement volume. Instead, our findings suggest that to maximize brand performance on social media platforms, companies should also encourage engagement variety.

Introduction

     Firms use social media platforms for increasing consumers’ brand engagement behavior by nurturing interactions among consumers or direct interactions with the brand itself (Hollebeek, Glynn, & Brodie, 2014; Schamari & Schaefers, 2015; Shawky, Kubacki, Dietrich, & Weaven, 2020). Typical examples of such engagement behavior include sharing, liking, or commenting of brand-specific content (e.g., de Vries, Gensler, & Leeflang, 2012; Luarn, Lin, & Chiu, 2015; Schultz, 2017; Shahbaznezhad, Dolan, & Rashidirad, 2021). The underlying rationale for fostering social media brand engagement behavior is that it positively affects what customers think and feel about a brand (e.g., in terms of brand attachment or attitude towards a brand), which in turn positively affects purchase behavior and ultimately translates into superior firm performance (e.g., Alvarez-Mil´ an, Felix, Rauschnabel, & Hinsch, 2018; Gensler, Volckner, ¨ Liu-Thompkins, & Wiertz, 2013; Keller and Lehmann, 2006; Steinhoff, Arli, Weaven, & Kozlenkova, 2019).

     The conceptual soundness of the sketched chain of effects notwithstanding, many marketers only attest moderate success of social media spending to company performance (CMOsurvey.org, 2020). Correspondingly, anecdotal and preliminary empirical evidence suggests that the effects of social media brand engagement might actually decay as the customer relationship matures (Beukeboom, Kerkhof, & de Vries, 2015, p. 35): “(…) effects of exposure to a brand’s content are strongest in the first stage where content and conversations are still new and surprising. At a later stage the effects may wear off”. We aim to expand existing knowledge on social media brand performance by empirically validating the presumed nonlinear relationship between consumers’ social media brand engagement behavior and brand outcomes.

Conclusion

     Consumer engagement has become a core objective for many brands (Harmeling et al., 2017). To this end, social media are increasingly used for interactions between companies and consumers (Malthouse et al., 2013; Trainor, Andzulis, Rapp, & Agnihotri, 2014). Predominantly, firms appear to aim at increasing the volume of engagement behavior, assuming direct and linear impacts on brand outcomes (Chang et al., 2019). In contrast to this widespread belief, our investigation reveals diminishing marginal utility of engagement volume. Moreover, we show that engagement variety can counter this effect, as the nonlinear influence is less pronounced when consumers’ engagement comprises a greater variety of behaviors.