Creating brand posts that stimulate consumer engagement on social media is both vital and challenging to digital marketers. Despite previous research on this topic, to date, little is known about how the linguistic styles of brand posts influence consumer engagement. Based on the communication accommodation theory, brand anthropomorphism literature, and linguistic research, this paper examined the effects of three brand post linguistic styles, namely, emotionality, complexity, and informality, on consumer engagement. Through analyzing the 15,396 brand posts collected from 104 Facebook pages, we found that the linguistic styles of brand posts can impact consumer engagement, but the effects vary regarding the three consumer engagement behaviors (i.e., like, share, comment). The findings of this paper improve our understanding of the role that language plays in brand-consumer communications on social media as well as provide guidelines for social media marketers on how to design engaging brand posts from the perspective of linguistics.

创建能刺激消费者在社交媒体上参与的品牌帖子对于数字营销人员来说既重要又具有挑战性。尽管之前对此主题进行了研究，但迄今为止，人们对品牌帖子的语言风格如何影响消费者参与度知之甚少。本文基于传播适应理论、品牌拟人化文献和语言学研究，考察了三种品牌后语言风格，即情感性、复杂性和非正式性对消费者参与的影响。通过分析从 104 个 Facebook 页面收集的 15,396 条品牌帖子，我们发现品牌帖子的语言风格会影响消费者参与度，但对三种消费者参与行为（即点赞、分享、评论）的影响各不相同。