“Do human values matter for promoting brands on social media? How social media users' values influence valuable brand‐related activities such as sharing, content creation, and reviews”

Abstract

Companies consider social media‐based consumer engagement behaviors such as sharing, content creation, and reviews for brands as more valuable than “liking” or consuming brand content. Studies show that branded content shared or created by consumers on social media may drive more brand awareness and loyalty than “likes” (Adweek, 2013). Global companies are increasingly focusing their efforts on motivating consumer‐driven content creation (e.g., Coca‐Cola #shareacoke and Apple #ShotoniPhone; Sprout Index, 2018). However, marketing practitioners are only recently beginning to understand social media audiences who engage in such activities (Adweek, 2018). This study posits that human values can be used to identify and segment audiences for social media‐based valuable brand activities. Three online surveys were conducted with Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram users (ages 18–34) on Amazon Mechanical Turk (N = 491). The relationship between social media users' values and their reported social media activities was examined. Findings indicate that the human values examined (conservation, self‐enhancement, openness to change and self‐transcendence) are significant drivers of valuable brand‐related social media activities. Companies should address conservation‐driven users in order to elicit brand sharing and creation activities. Companies should target conservation‐driven users for sharing promotions, self‐enhancement‐driven users for sharing informational content and writing of product reviews, and openness to change‐driven users for user‐generated content. Bussinesses should further highlight their corporate social responsibility efforts as a negative relationship is found between users' self‐transcendence values and brand activities. Recommendations are provided on how brandscan address users' values in their social media marketing to motivate sharing of branded content and content creation.

“What drives loyal fans of brand pages to take action? The effects of self-expansion and flow on loyal page fans’ sharing and creation activities”

“…Personal growth motivations have been found to drive sharing and creation activities but to a lesser extent than motivations relating to conservation and self-enhancement (Nikolinakou and Phua 2020 ). Applying self-expansion theory of close relationships, which posits that self-expansion occurs in close interpersonal or consumer–brand relationships (Aron et al 2013 ; Reinman et al .…”

“…Further, creative strategies on social media that appeal to users’ senses, offer exclusive benefits, enhance users’ self-esteem (Ashley and Tuten 2015 ), include photos, videos and links, mention other users or celebrities, explain product characteristics and introduce new brands, are more likely to engage users on social media (Tafesse 2016 ). Studies have also examined types of audiences in relation to brand-related sharing and creation activities (Nikolinakou and Phua 2020 ; Van Meter et al 2018 ). Van Meter et al ( 2018 ) show that audiences that are more attached to social media platforms are also more likely to engage in meaningful activities such as sharing brand-related content and advocating for brands on social media.…”

“…Further, users driven by conservation or those who value safety and security tend to share more promotional content compared to other types of users. Users driven by self-enhancement, or users who value power and achievement, tend to share more expert information and write reviews for brands, compared to other audiences (Nikolinakou and Phua 2020 ). Self-enhancement, affiliation, entertainment, information-seeking and personal identity motivations have also been found to be important motivations for brand-related social media engagement (Muntiga 2011 ).…”

Developing UGC social brand engagement model: Insights from diverse consumers

“…Recent literature uncovered social media influence from various marketing perspectives: small retailers (Devereux, Grimmer, & Grimmer, 2020), content strategies (Kordzadeh & Young, 2020), brand promotions (Nikolinakou & Phua, 2020), consumer value co‐creation (Alalwan et al, 2019), WOM and purchase intention (Alalwan, 2018; Chu & Chen, 2019), communication and social marketing strategies (Appel, Grewal, Hadi, & Stephen, 2020; Li, Larimo, & Leonidou, 2020), consumer empowerment (Tajurahim, Abu Bakar, Md Jusoh, Ahmad, & Muhammad Arif, 2020), user‐generated images (Bakri, Krisjanous, & Richard, 2020), consumer behaviour (Sobhanifard & Sadatfarizani, 2018), and brand engagement and brand equity (Algharabat, Rana, Alalwan, Baabdullah, & Gupta, 2020). However, there is inadequate understanding regarding the social motivational causes and social influencers that can play a role in generating and exchanging user‐generated fashion brand‐related content.…”

How language affects consumers' processing of numerical cues

“…As summarized in Table 2, we ran four experiments with 732 bilingual participants mostly from two widely used online‐panels: http://mturk.com (Amazon Mechanical Turk) and http://qualtrics.com. Although some online participants respond unconscientiously (Downs, Holbrook, Sheng, & Cranor, 2010), there is considerable research that establishes the effectiveness of using online platforms and shows how constructing careful instruments can achieve optimal results (Goodman, Cryder, & Cheema, 2013; Kara, Vredeveld, & Ross, 2018; Nikolinakou & Phua, 2020). Our recruitment of bilingual respondents enabled us to make random assignments between languages, which minimized the confounding effects of individual characteristics or sociocultural predispositions while increasing the robustness of our findings.…”