This article considers how employees engage with B2B firms on social media, a topic that is largely overlooked in the extant brand engagement literature. Using the results from a large-scale study of employee brand engagement on social media, two key drivers of employee brand engagement are identified using the content analysis tool DICTION–—namely, optimism and commonality. Employees of top-ranked and -rated firms express higher levels of optimism and commonality in their reviews of their employers on social media than do their counterparts in bottom-ranked and -rated firms. This permits the construction of a 2
۲ matrix that allows managers to diagnose strategies for increasing or improving employee brand engagement. This creates four different kinds of employee brand engagement situations, and offers human resources and marketing managers different strategies in each case. We demonstrate how practitioners and scholars can shed new light on the way stakeholders engage with brands.

Increasing a brand’s value

In the recent marketing literature, there has been a significant amount of attention dedicated to the concept of brand engagement, the process of how emotional or rational attachments are formed between customers or other stakeholders and brands (e.g., Baldus, Voorhees, & Calantone, 2015; Brodie, Hollebeek, Juri
c, & Ili
c, 2011; Brodie, Ili
c, Juri
c, & Hollebeek, 2013; de Villiers, 2015; Graffigna & Gambetti, 2015; Hollebeek, 2011; Hollebeek, Glynn, & Brodie, 2014). Brand engagement is an important concept in the marketing literature as it is strongly connected to brand equity or, put simply,the value of the brand. As articulated by Keller (2012), brand equity is often driven by a consumer’s association with a brand’s features and attributes and the ultimate engagement with the brand. Brand engagement itself has also changed significantly in the recent past largely due to the advent of social media. Kietzmann, Hermkens, McCarthy, and Silvestre (2011, p. 241) described social media as mobile and web-based technologies that “create highly interactive platforms via which individuals and communities share, co-create, discuss, and modify user-generated content.” Some of the best-known social media include the social networking platform Facebook, the micro-blogging website Twitter, and the video-sharing website YouTube, but also comprise more specialized social media platforms. These include the travel and hospitality platform TripAdvisor, the picture-sharing platform Instagram, and the ephemeral contentsharing platform Snapchat. Social media platforms with a more professional slant include the peer-topeer platform LinkedIn, and the job description and evaluation site Glassdoor.com. Users can interact and share personal information with not only other users on these social media in a variety of ways, but also with the brands with which they choose to engage (Berthon, Pitt, Plangger, & Shapiro, 2012; Kietzmann et al., 2011). After reviewing the extant researchandmanagerial literature with regard to brand engagement on social media, two trends emerge. First, customers–—rather than other stakeholders such as employees, suppliers, and investors–—are overwhelmingly the focus. Second,the brand engagementliterature has concentrated consumers–—or the customers of business-toconsumer (B2C) firms–—rather than the industrial and organizational customers of business-to-business (B2B) firms or their stakeholders. Scholars have just started to explore both customer (CE) and employee engagement (EE) and how they affect firm performance (Kumar & Pansari, 2016) in both B2C and B2B firms. In this article, we recognize the importance of employees as stakeholders who engage with their employer brands on social media. When employees are positively engaged with their employee brands on social media and this engagement is well managed, there are many benefits to an organization’s customers, its employees, and to the organization itself.