Online engagement factors on Facebook brand pages

Social networks have become an additional marketing channel that could be integrated with the traditional ones as a part of the marketing mix. The change in the dynamics of the marketing interchange between companies and consumers as introduced by social networks has placed a focus on the non-transactional customer behavior. In this new marketing era, the terms engagement and participation became the central non-transactional constructs, used to describe the nature of participants’ specific interactions and/or interactive experiences. These changes imposed challenges to the traditional one-way marketing, resulting in companies experimenting with many different approaches, thus shaping a successful social media approach based on the trial-and-error experiences. To provide insights to practitioners willing to utilize social networks for marketing purposes, our study analyzes the influencing factors in terms of characteristics of the content communicated by the company, such as media type, content type, posting day and time, over the level of online customer engagement measured by number of likes, comments and shares, and interaction duration for the domain of a Facebook brand page. Our results show that there is a different effect of the analyzed factors over individual engagement measures. We discuss the implications of our findings for social media marketing.