What corporate social media content leads to higher consumer response : A study of local brands in Sweden

Sammanfattning: Background: Social media is connecting billions of people from across the globe by fulfilling basic human needs of socializing and getting entertained. While companies are now actively turning to social media to know their customers better, build strong relationships, and spread marketing messages, many are still struggling to figure out what corporate social media content actually works on social media. Purpose: This research aims to understand what type of corporate social media content generates the most consumer response. Methodology: This study employs content analysis of recent social media posts by a selection of top brands in Sweden on two main social media platforms: Facebook and Twitter. A total of ten brands with origin from Sweden were selected, based on 2015 Swedish Brand Award ranking, and their posts were examined to find out influence of corporate social media content on consumer response. A total of 400 posts were examined on verified Twitter profiles and Facebook Pages of these brands. Findings: Type of content which refers to whether the post has image, video, or text-only content, and content orientation which can be task-oriented, self-oriented, or interaction-oriented have a statistically significant relationship with consumer response. In terms of type of content, posts with video and image content can lead to higher consumer response and in terms of content orientation task-oriented content can lead to higher consumer response. Other variables in the study, namely, communication cues, traceability cues, and time-frame have not emerged as significant in this study. Implications: When developing corporate social media content, it’s important to focus on type of content and content orientation. In terms of type of content, managers need to focus on having video and image content as this could lead to higher consumer response and in terms of content orientation, content related to brand / product / promotion (task-oriented) can lead to higher consumer response. Limitations: The study relies only on two main social media platforms and on the last 20 posts of each brand on each of these platforms and doesn’t take into account any seasonality as a full year period has not been studied. The study also relies on a general brand ranking list based in Sweden and not a ranking of brands on social media space. Further Research Suggestions: Future studies could focus on bringing more social media platforms into inquiry, improving sampling robustness by having a larger sample size and broader coverage of time period to account for any seasonality in data, comparing results between different countries, having a broader mix of brands in terms of type of business area or sector or stage of brand development, and blending together the corporate and consumer perspectives. Finally, to account for platform size differences, researchers need to come up with a measure that controls for this variation across platforms. Keywords: Social Media Content, Social Media Platforms, Facebook, Twitter, Communication