Managing Industrial Innovation Communications on Social Media Platforms for Effective User Engagement

The enormous presence of users over social media platforms (SMPs) has been harnessed by B2B marketers and researchers across the innovation process. However, limited research has examined the marketing of firms’ industrial innovation practices over SMPs. Through the lens of signaling theory, we identified the presence of organizational, product, process, marketing, and social innovation operations in their SM posts. These posts were further analyzed using multimodal analytical techniques to identify their embedded textual and visual features. The results indicate that using SMPs for announcing industrial innovation practices is essential. It also shows the prevalence of users’ interest in the information relevant to organizational innovation practices of B2B firms. Our study provides a guidebook for social media managers that leads them from “what” to “how” while designing social media posts for effective user engagement.