Brand Post Popularity on Social Media: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Social media has now become an indispensable marketing tool. Much research has been done to understand what makes brands' social media posts popular by attracting Likes, Comments and/or Shares. The objective of this paper is to carry out a systematic literature review on brand post popularity on social media. Through a literature search on Scopus-the largest database of peer-reviewed literature, 19 relevant articles were identified. Facebook has been the most widely studied platform while only a handful of works have focused on Instagram and Twitter. Platforms such as LinkedIn and TikTok have not been studied. Scholarly attention has mostly been trained on well-known and popular brands. A list of 22 antecedents of brand post popularity could be identified, some of which have often yielded contradictory findings. Several directions for future research are proposed. Consistencies in the literature are also summarized for the benefit of practitioners such as social media marketers.

What Makes Rumor Rebuttals Viral on Social Media?

“…Call to action in rebuttals also contributed to their virality. The marketing and consumer engagement literature has shown that social media posts that nudge consumers to act tend to become popular online [11]. Dovetailing the literature, this paper shows that a call to action is an important trait for not only marketing messages but also rumor rebuttals.…”

“…Explicit calls to action could be important in rumor rebuttals to drive home their intended purpose. By encouraging users to actively participate in myth-busting efforts, they are more likely to go viral than rebuttals that do not include a call to action statement [11,18].…”

“…The presence of an image reflects whether a rebuttal included a picture or a graphical illustration [18,26]. Research has demonstrated that vivid content in social media posts enhances Likes, Comments as well as Shares [11]. This is largely driven by the conventional wisdom that a picture is worth a thousand words.…”

“…In the meantime, a wider body of marketing and consumer engagement literature [8][9][10] has shown that characteristics of social media posts dictate the extent to which they attract attention and become viral (see [11] for a recent systematic literature review on the topic). For example, [12] found that posts that offer entertainment tend to become viral easily.…”

“…This research stream has a predominantly information science and information management flavor. The other looks into factors that make social media posts-but not necessarily rumors and/or rebuttals-popular and viral [8][9][10][11][12][13]. This research stream tends to be driven by a marketing and consumer engagement perspective.…”