The Effectiveness of Brand- and Customer-Centric Content Strategies at Generating Shares, ‘Likes’, and Comments

ABSTRACT

Brands are constantly competing for user attention on Facebook and are trying to encourage fans to share, click ‘like’, and comment their posts. Yet, it remains unclear what content strategies are successful at encouraging those behaviors. Noting that the effectiveness of brand content strategies still remains an uncharted research area, this study adopts a discovery-oriented approach and employs workshops, quantitative content analysis, and episodic interviews, to link desired user responses (namely clicks share, ‘like’, and comment) to brand content strategies. This study reveals that customer-centric content strategies are the most effective at encouraging user responses. Managers can use provided recommendations to engage their customers by adopting content strategies that result in desired behavioral reactions.

KEYWORDS:

• brand-generated content
• clicking ‘like’
• commenting
• content sharing
• content strategy
• social media
• user responses

Notes

¹ As not all participants agreed for the sessions to be recorded, a research assistant present for the entire duration of all workshops took notes, which were then analyzed together with the content samples provided by participants.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Nicolaus Copernicus University (2023-E) and the Foundation for Economic Education(10-5464).