The outcome of online social interactions on Facebook pages

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of different ways of message framing on users’ engagement behavior regarding the brand posts on Facebook and to determine whether users’ thumbs-up and reply moderate this impact. Design/methodology/approach A panel data analysis was conducted on a panel with 11,894 observations on 850 unique brand posts from the Facebook pages of the world’s most valuable brands over a seven days window with two observations each day. A system of equations was estimated using ordinary least squares, Hausman–Taylor IV and seemingly unrelated regressions to test study’s hypotheses. Findings The empirical findings confirm that more positively and negatively framed comments result in increased users’ engagement. Also, an increase in thumbs-up ratio for neutrally and negatively framed comments results in less engagement. The reply ratio might also have a positive and negative moderation effect on the influence of neutrally and positively framed comments on engagement behavior, respectively. Practical implications This study provides an in-depth understanding of online social interactions on Facebook pages for firms’ managers and marketers. Online social interactions might be either harmful or fruitful for firms depending on the type of interaction and engagement behavior. Findings can help managers and marketer to improve their strategies for leveraging Facebook for electronic marketing. Originality/value This is likely to be the first study that examines the moderating effect of users’ thumbs-up and reply on the relationship between message framing and users’ engagement behavior. By providing robust findings by addressing issues like omitted variables and endogeneity, the findings of this study are promising for developing new hypotheses and theoretical models in the context of online social interactions.

Information Sharing on Social Media by Multicultural Individuals

“…As the findings reveal that the RI (Network factor) play a vital role to influence social media behavior. Besides, there are enough studies in which Facebook was taken as platform (Khobzi, 2019) and ignored other multi-functional platforms such as WeChat, Weibo, Twitter, etc. Therefore, this study has taken WeChat as a social media platform and investigated the patterns of information flow and sharing among diversified users.…”

The missing link in the promotion of customer engagement: the roles of brand fan page attractiveness and agility

“…Despite substantial investment in social media, customer engagement has constantly declined and only 0.07% of Facebook fans interact with brands' posts (Gayomali, 2014; Local Measure, 2019). Thus, managers have become increasingly concerned with how to convert social media investments into meaningful customer engagement (Khobzi et al , 2019; Marbach et al , 2016). While research concerning social media engagement is rapidly burgeoning, an in-depth understanding of how to foster such engagement is limited (Dolan et al , 2019).…”

The more the merrier? The effects of system-aggregated group size information on user's efficacy and intention to participate in collective actions

“…Prior Computer-mediated communication (CMC) studies have primarily focused on how people use social media cues such language use, content topic and profile photos to form impressions about other individuals, few studies have examined how people use social media cues to form impressions about groups (Walther and Parks, 2002;Walther et al, 2008;Khobzi et al, 2019). For example, Tong et al (2008) examined how the number of friends on Facebook can be used by users to apprise attractiveness about an individual.…”

“…Additionally, since many of these networked collective actions are not mobilized through existing movement organizations, without existing affiliations to reference, individuals depend on available cues to assess the groups' credibility (Walther and Parks, 2002;Khobzi et al, 2019) and make strategic decisions about their participation (Brunsting and Postmes, 2002). Assessing the group size helps individuals construct expectations about the likelihood of the collective action reaching its goals, and how much influence do they personally have on the collective action (Klandermans, 2004;Simon and Klandermans, 2001).…”