Brand Disengagement on Social Media Platforms: An Abstract

After the initial course of user-driven dissemination, organizational use of social media has taken hold in recent years. Even though Facebook still maintains the largest user base, the landscape of social media platforms has become more diverse. Consequently, brands are adjusting their social media strategies and allocate their budgets accordingly. Even though a broad body of literature exists that discusses strategies of brand engagement in social media and the subsequent benefits of extending relevant activities, there is another side to the story. Several new social media platforms have emerged serving different purposes, thus creating challenges for brands to target the right customer base. This dynamic environment challenges brands to continuously adjust their social media strategies. In particular, brands can no longer rely on one or two social media platforms alone, as more niche platforms increase in significance.

Based on Facebook, our study investigates 23 brands of four industries (Banking, Automotive, Retailing, Apparel) and demonstrates different types of organizational exit strategies from established social media communities. Besides outright abandoning their online communities, brands can reduce either output quality or lower the frequency of their activities, thereby upsetting their communities and potentially harming activities on other social media platforms. Overall, we identify four exit strategy archetypes based on brands’ general efforts to pursue an exit (long posting intervals, less activity, and less own content) and the speed at which the disengagement takes place. In consequence, current research tends to over-emphasize the importance of expanding the use of social media, while largely ignoring reverse activities taking place on these platforms. Practice already deals with the phenomenon, using different ways of disengagement that range from slowly decreasing activity to abandoning communities entirely.

The social media landscape will continue to grow in the foreseeable future. For instance, Facebook is still expected to be an integral part of social media brand activities, but not maintaining its (prior) monopoly. Our study is only a first (explorative) step to shed light on the adverse side effects of having to manage a growing social media portfolio and operating on a budget that may not be growing as exponentially as the social media landscape. Social media research has to provide guidance on how to handle different approaches of disengagement and provide suitable methods to re-adjust the social media strategies. We hope that our initial results provide an avenue for future research on different aspects of brands’ disengagement in social media.