Hamid Khobzi, Raymond Y.K. Lau and Terence C.H. Cheung
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…
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.
Details
Keywords
Hamid Khobzi and Babak Teimourpour
The purpose of this study is to assign polarity score to each post from Facebook fan pages, and then examine whether the Comments submitted by users on a post from fan page have a…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to assign polarity score to each post from Facebook fan pages, and then examine whether the Comments submitted by users on a post from fan page have a significant relationship with the popularity of that post. Being aware of how to enhance the popularity of posts will help companies in terms of administrating their fan pages.
Design/methodology/approach
In the context of fan page and post popularity, the authors test significance of the relationship between Comments’ polarity and number of Likes and Comments of a post in different Facebook pages by regression method. The data are collected from different fan page posts in Facebook, and a sentiment analysis approach is proposed to accomplish this research.
Findings
Results show that the relation between users’ Comments and popularity of fan page posts is strongly significant. Outcomes of this research are useful for every company in terms of monitoring and managing their brand fan pages on social networking sites such as Facebook.
Originality/value
Investigation of factors influencing popularity of fan page posts in social media is almost a new area of study that dates back to recent years. The authors use a sentiment analysis approach to evaluate a new concept describing the relationship between users’ Comments and popularity of posts from Facebook fan pages. Moreover, a part of dataset is extracted from Facebook by a crawler which is an advantage to prior studies.