Brand-generated social media content and its differential impact on loyalty program members

Social media and loyalty programs are mainstays of contemporary marketing, but despite their prominence—and their potential synergies—the two are seldom researched together. Here, drawing on the heuristic-systematic model, we theorize and demonstrate that the dimensions of customer experience in brand-generated social media content lead to different sales responses from loyalty program and non-loyalty program customers. Based on several thousand social media posts connected to both loyalty and non-loyalty program sales, we show that relational and intellectual content have greater effects in driving sales to loyalty program members while behavioral content drives greater sales to non-loyalty program members. These findings improve our understanding of the financial outcomes of social media tactics, providing researchers and marketers with an understanding of the differences in responses across customer groups and a framework to optimize social media content.