Despite the dominant role of images on social platforms, the research on evaluating visual content is limited in marketing literature. We innovatively proposed using image richness to measure the visual contents by adopting a deep learning algorithm. We collected images embedded in posts by influencers from Sina Weibo and investigated how image richness affects customer engagement. Results show that image richness is positively related with emotional engagement and behavioral engagement, while negatively connected with cognitive engagement. Further, we find that the effect of image richness on customer engagement is more pronounced for experience goods and posters with greater social influence. However, the relationship is weakened by posts' text length, especially for emotional and cognitive engagement. Our paper enriches the literature on the effectiveness of visual content and advances the understanding of customer engagement on social media platforms. These results also shed light on implementing social marketing strategies with images.

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图像丰富度对客户参与度的影响：来自新浪微博的证据

尽管图像在社交平台上发挥着主导作用，但评估视觉内容的研究在营销文献中仍然有限。我们创新性地提出通过采用深度学习算法，利用图像丰富度来衡量视觉内容。我们收集了新浪微博影响者帖子中嵌入的图像，并研究了图像丰富度如何影响客户参与度。结果表明，图像丰富度与情感投入和行为投入呈正相关，而与认知投入呈负相关。此外，我们发现，对于社会影响力较大的体验商品和海报，图像丰富度对顾客参与度的影响更为明显。然而，这种关系会因帖子的文本长度而减弱，尤其是在情感和认知方面。我们的论文丰富了有关视觉内容有效性的文献，并增进了对社交媒体平台上客户参与度的理解。这些结果还为利用图像实施社交营销策略提供了启示。