Customer engagement behaviour in the media and technology industry: a quantitative content analysis of content types and COVID-19 context

ABSTRACT

Brand pages on social networking sites represent excellent vehicles for customer relationship management. These pages enable companies to interact with their customers and to foster their engagement. This study examines the relationship between, and moderating impact of, customer engagement behaviour and a COVID-19-related context as well as content types. The content of 1,946 company-generated Facebook brand posts of 16 media and technology companies was analysed. A hierarchical regression analysis was used to test the hypotheses. The results show that a COVID-19-related context and the content type are associated with customer engagement behaviour. These factors both partly interact and directly correlate with customer engagement behaviour. This study contributes to the literature by establishing (crisis-related) social media guidelines for media and technology companies.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• crisis communication
• customer engagement
• media and technology industry
• quantitative content analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. The brand posts are written either in English or in German.

2. In content analyses, the artificial week principle is often used for sampling. In order to spread the sample more broadly, all the investigation units that were published on the Monday of the first week, all the investigation units that were published on the Tuesday of the second week, and so on over the study period, are included in the investigation to create after seven calendar weeks an artificial week of media offers.