Factors Increasing Consumer Engagement of Branded Content in Instagram

Companies use social media to foster ongoing relationships with customers. One specific way companies do this is by fostering brand communities through fan pages on social networking sites. These virtual platforms allow consumers to become brand advocates. It also allows brands to generate and increase direct engagement with consumers, which is a key metric to assess brand performance. However, little is known about how different post criteria influences distinct levels of social media engagement. To explore this further, we developed a model to analyze the impact of 31 structural, semantic, and morphological content factors over consumer engagement, measured by the number of likes and comments on 680 brand posts from 14 Instagram fan pages across ten sectors. The results revealed a solid model, with an explanatory power of 73.1% (R2) for likes and 47.5% (R2) for comments. The results also established how content factors influenced different engagement levels; i.e. videos with sound, carousel posts with multiple photos, and posts with hashtags achieved higher engagement levels in terms of likes. Contrarily, graphics, interactive content that involved voting, contests, and questions reached higher engagement with regard to comments. We contribute to academic and practical research this new model to study and implement social media solutions that improve customer engagement as part of an organizations' marketing and branding strategies. The limitations of this paper relate to the size of the sample and the scope of the reviewed literature.