Abstract:

Social media offers a quick route for promoting close relationships with customers. One specific way to do this is to create brand fanpages on social networking sites. Companies can publish brand posts (containing images, texts, videos, information, and other contents) on their respective brand fanpages. Consumers can become users of these brand fanpages by becoming a fan, and consequently mark that they like the brand post or leave comments. These actions and comments help spread brand information. Liking or sharing brand posts enhances the fanpage’s viral reach. Marketers determine the effectiveness of social media marketing policies by measuring viral reach. In this article, we determine possible drivers for users’ viral actions. We collected contents on all types of brand posts and selected the most frequently posted items (contents) to determine their respective impacts on producing user engagement action (viral reach). We analyzed 1950 brand posts from 13 international Electronics brands, and the data was collected from December 2015 to August 2016. The findings indicated that different drivers influence the number of comments, likes, and the number of shares differently. Managers of brands that operate brand fanpages can be guided by our results to determine which content to publish at brand posts based on their requirements. Moreover, the types of contents that are posted frequently in fanpages can be explored, which will be helpful for B2C (Business to consumer) marketers.