How advertising in offline media drives reach of and engagement with brands on Facebook

Abstract

Research investigating the drivers of consumers' engagement with brands on social media is proliferating. However, little is known about how advertising outside social media drives engagement with brands on social media. This study aims to explore the relation between advertising spend in different offline media (TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, out of home), and reach of and engagement with brand pages on Facebook. The study uses a unique real-life data-set containing information about the Facebook pages of 45 brands for approximately three years combined with Nielsen Advertising Spend data. Results showed that while advertising in offline media influenced organic and viral reach, the number of page likes was directly influenced by advertising on Facebook only. It can be concluded that offline advertising is relevant in driving consumers' online brand engagement; however, there is a unique set of drivers for organic reach, viral reach and likes.

Brand Communication in Social Media: A Research Agenda

“…Existing research has mainly focused on sales. Although this focus on sales is in line with the media agencies' expectations about social selling, future studies should also focus on the role of social media in different stages of the decision process, such as need recognition, awareness, consideration, and evaluation (e.g., see Batra and Keller 2016;Voorveld et al 2016). Finally, because social media are often used simultaneously with other media, future research on the effects of media multitasking with social media is important.…”

“…Another relevant challenge with regard to channel characteristics of social media is that in a brand communication program, social media are usually not used as a stand-alone activity but are combined with other media. In addition, consumers more often than not use social media in combination with other digital and traditional media in their consumer journey (Kannan and Li 2017;Voorveld, Araujo, et al 2018).…”

“…Another direction of great importance is the interaction of social media with other digital and nondigital brand communication. Research focusing on both social media and other digital and nondigital media is scarce but needed, because we cannot get a full picture of the effects of social media without considering the cross-media nature of most campaigns (Voorveld, Neijens, and Smit 2011).…”

Influencing COBRAs: the effects of brand equity on the consumer’s propensity to engage with brand-related content on social media

“…Understanding which CBBE dimensions translate into more (or less) engagement behaviors allows brand managers to single out the relevant customer mindset metrics that require their attention (Petersen et al 2018). As for instance, advertising that pushes these metrics can subsequently drive online brand engagement (de Vries, Gensler, and Leeflang 2017;Voorveld et al 2018).…”

What You Post is What You Get: The Mediator Role of Reached Individuals in the Causal Relationship among Posted Content Types and Follower Counts on Facebook

“…Socialbreakers, a social media analytics company, conducted an analysis of 5,000 Facebook brand and media pages in 2015 and found that post shares strongly correlate with reached individuals in the cases of both media and brand pages on Facebook (Socialbakers, 2015). Albeit the scarcity of research regarding the role of reached individuals on user engagement, recent research indicates a significant drop in terms of organic and viral reach on Facebook in recent years on brand pages (Voorveld, Araujo, Bernritter, Rietberg, & Vliegenthart, 2018). Furthermore, Voorveld et al (2018) found that paid reach in the form of advertising and the number of post likes were the most substantial influencing factors of organic reach on Facebook; however, paid advertising on websites outside of Facebook do not contribute to higher activity on the analysed social media platform.…”