Understanding consumer engagement with brand posts on social media: The effects of post linguistic styles

Highlights

• Analyzing the 15,396 brand posts collected from 104 Facebook brand pages representing 18 industries using text mining.

• Examining the effects of three brand post linguistic styles, namely, emotionality, complexity, and informality, on consumer engagement.

• Linguistic styles of brand posts impact consumer engagement, but the effects vary regarding the three consumer engagement behaviors (i.e., like, share, comment).

• Deepen our understanding of the role that language plays in brand-consumer communications on social media.

Abstract

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.

Introduction

Social media has changed the way that brands and consumers communicate with each other and become an important marketing channel. Brands now regularly post on social media, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and consumers can follow and actively engage with them by liking, sharing, or commenting on their posts. For social media marketers, enhancing consumer engagement is crucial because it facilitates social contagion effects (Martínez-López et al., 2017) and leads to higher brand awareness, preference, and consideration (Coursaris et al., 2016b, Cruz et al., 2017, de Vries et al., 2017, Hutter et al., 2013), higher brand equity (Coursaris et al., 2016b, Wagner et al., 2017), and better brand performance, such as sales, new customer acquisition, and brand value (de Vries et al., 2017, Kumar et al., 2016). However, it has been reported that only around 1% of the brand followers on Facebook engage with the brands, and, even within the most active Facebook brand pages, the fan engagement rate is merely 4.3% (eMarketer, , 2015, Lee et al., 2018). Social media marketers are struggling with creating brand posts that stimulate consumer engagement (Ashley and Tuten, 2015, Cambra-Fierro et al., 2019).

Previous research has examined the effects of brand post characteristics, such as post content type, post media type, and posting time and frequency, and suggested that marketers can strategically design brand posts to improve consumer engagement (Cvijikj and Michahelles, 2013, de Vries et al., 2012, Kim et al., 2015, Luarn et al., 2015, Wagner et al., 2017). However, little research has examined the brand language and its impacts on consumer engagement (Cruz et al., 2017, Jakic et al., 2017, Lee et al., 2018). Serving as the medium that communicates meanings, brand language plays a significant role in shaping consumers’ perception, memory, attitude, and behavior (Carnevale et al., 2017). On social media, brand-consumer communications rely even more heavily on language than in the offline world (Carnevale et al., 2017). Unlike offline communications where messages can be conveyed using verbal (e.g., language), para-verbal (e.g., voice), and non-verbal (e.g., gesture) cues, brand posts on social media are mainly dependent on verbal cues (Jakic et al., 2017). Therefore, the language of brand posts could influence consumer perceptions, which further impact consumer engagement behaviors.

This paper aims to examine the impacts of brand post language on consumer engagement. Based on the communication accommodation theory (CAT), brand anthropomorphism literature, and linguistic research, this paper investigated the effects of three brand post linguistic styles (i.e., emotionality, complexity, and informality) on consumer engagement. Through analyzing the 15,396 brand posts collected from 104 Facebook pages, this paper revealed that the linguistic styles of brand posts impact consumer engagement, but the effects vary regarding the three consumer engagement behaviors (i.e., like, share, comment). This paper contributes to consumer engagement research by improving our understanding of the role that brand language plays in shaping consumer engagement on social media. It also contributes to marketing communication literature by expanding the growing research on brand communication on social media.

The findings of this paper inform digital marketers of the importance of brand language style, showing that, beyond what brands communicate, how brands communicate also matters. The results suggest that, to better interact with consumers on social media, digital marketers should carefully consider and design the linguistic styles of brand posts.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 provides the literature review and theoretical foundation of this paper, and section 3 discusses the development of hypotheses. Section 4 describes the methodology, and section 5 presents the results. Section 6 discusses implications, limitations, and agendas that could be explored in future research.