When they like and when they comment: drivers of consumer engagement on social media
研究了企业视角下社交媒体平台特性（高/低可供性）、品牌来源（本地/全球）和产品类型（享乐/实用）如何影响消费者点赞和评论行为，基于85个品牌超百万条帖子数据。
Purpose This paper aims to investigate factors influencing consumer engagement (CE) on social media platforms from the perspective of the firm. Affordance theory and information processing explain user response to brand posts on social media platforms; additionally, literature on brand origin and product type provide further theoretical underpinning. Design/methodology/approach This paper presents and tests a conceptual framework, which depicts the drivers of CE (i.e. likes, comments) on social media from the perspective of the firm. Specifically, this paper tests the effect of social media (low affordance [LASM; operationalized by Twitter] versus high affordance [HASM; operationalized by Instagram) and brand origin (local vs global) on CE. The moderating effect of product type (hedonic vs utilitarian) is also tested. Data (i.e. more than one million posts) on 85 brands that posted content on both Twitter and Instagram was used to test the conceptual model. Findings This paper uses zero inflated mixed-effects regression approach to test the conceptual model. The findings uncover that firms’ brand posts on HASM generate more consumer engagement than those on LASM. In addition, this effect is more pronounced for firms’ brand posts related to hedonic (vs utilitarian) products. In addition, this paper finds that firms’ brand posts for local (vs global) brands create higher CE, but for global brands, this effect is more significant in the context of utilitarian products (vs hedonic ones). Finally, there is a significant positive quadratic coefficient for comments (i.e. follower comments follow a U-shaped curve), but not for likes. Research limitations/implications The empirical results show that utilitarian products elicit low CE on rich and HASM (i.e. Instagram), and hedonic products receive increased CE, with an even larger effect on HASM (i.e. Instagram). The findings also show that global brands are inclined to receive lesser CE (for both Likes and Comments) when compared to local brands and that these negative effects are less pronounced for utilitarian products. Practical implications Results imply that overly frequent brand posting by firms is less likely to contribute to more consumers clicking the “like” button. Originality/value In recent years, firms have undergone significant shifts in their approach to managing social media platforms, transitioning from a passive stance, such as monitoring, to a more proactive approach, involving active interactions, in the context of consumer engagement (CE: likes and comments). There is little prior research on factors influencing CE on social media platforms from the perspective of the firm.