Does culture matter in effectiveness of social media marketing strategy? An investigation of brand fan pages
| Date | 21 November 2016 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/AJIM-03-2016-0035 |
| Published date | 21 November 2016 |
| Pages | 694-715 |
| Author | Imran Khan,Han Dongping,Akhter Wahab |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Information behaviour & retrieval,Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information management |
Does culture matter in
effectiveness of social media
marketing strategy? An
investigation of brand fan pages
Imran Khan
Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China and
The Islamia University of Bahawalpur, Bahawalpur, Pakistan
Han Dongping
Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China, and
Akhter Wahab
Scrapinghub, Cork, Ireland
Abstract
Purpose –Along with traditional marketing channels, social media outlets are integrated as a part of
the marketing mix. Social media has changed the dynamics of interaction between companies and
consumers that foster this relationship. Managing brand fan pages on social networking sites is a
specific way the companies are using. Customers can become brand fans on these pages and indicate
that they like the brand posts, share on their wall or simply comment. The purpose of this paper is to
analyse the impact of cultural differences on the effectiveness of social media metrics and scientifically
tested brand engagement in terms of commitment, loyalty and brand recommendations.
Design/methodology/approach –The authors analysed 1,922 brand posts from five different
brands of a single product category in three different countries. Ordinary least square and hierarchical
moderation regression was used to test the hypotheses.
Findings –Results show that all determinants are not equally suitable for enhancement of number of
likes, comments and shares. More specifically, vivid and interactive brand post determinants enhance
the number of likes. Furthermore, interactive brand posts enhance the number of comments while vivid
brand posts enhance number of shares. Moreover, impact and intensity vary across different cultures.
Originality/value –Brand fan page moderators can obtain guidance from the research in formulating
their social media marketing strategies in order to decide which post determinants to place on the fan page.
Keywords Interaction, Facebook, Social media marketing, Social networking sites, Online engagement,
Post contents
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
The intensity of following brand on social media is increasing gradually. Half of the
social media users are addicted to following brands on social media (Hutchinson, 2015)
and the investment of companies in social media is also increasing rapidly. The
increasing investment in social media is for the purpose of enhancing the interactive
relationshipwith customers. To attain this objective, companies are using differentways
such as blogs, electronic word-of-mouth and microblogs (e.g. Facebook and Twitter).
Social media provides user-generated contents which are more effective than the
conventional marketing communication in influencing behaviours and attitudes of
consumers (Thackeray et al., 2008). Web 2.0 is a platform in which software and
contents are more dynamic in nature and these can be developed and produced by
many participants in a continuous and collaborative way (Laroche et al., 2012).
Aslib Journal of Information
Management
Vol. 68 No. 6, 2016
pp. 694-715
©Emerald Group Publishing Limited
2050-3806
DOI 10.1108/AJIM-03-2016-0035
Received 29 March 2016
Revised 9 August 2016
Accepted 9 August 2016
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/2050-3806.htm
694
AJIM
68,6
This interactive application has positively attracted organizations in developing
and managing brand fan pages on social media to enhance the organizational social
network salience and shape strong customer relationships, resulting in social media
being an effective and vital communication strategy tool.
Prior research identified that culture impacts consumers’decision-making process
and information seeking (Mangold and Smith, 2012; McGuinness et al., 1991). However,
no research available in the literature shows the impact cultural difference has on social
media metrics and do not explore the structural differences in depth (King et al., 2014).
The aim of the current research is to analyse the impact of cultural differences on the
effectiveness of social media metrics and to scientifically test brand engagement in
terms of commitment, loyalty and brand recommendations.
The paper continues with the following structure: The next section discusses related
studies and hypotheses development. The Section 3 describes the adopted
methodology and Section 4 explains the results of the analysis. Section 5 concludes
the paper with managerial implications, and lastly, Section 6 provides limitations of the
study and suggests guidelines for future research.
2. Related studies and hypotheses development
Recently, numerous investigators have conducted research on the content analysis of brand
fan pages on Facebook to social media content effectiveness in consumer responses. Details
are available in Table I about the variety of studies conducted on social media content
analysis and also provide details on content dimensions or metrics, social platforms used and
variable(s). Organizations are using engagement metrics to track their activities on social
media but the measurements remain a challenge (Moorman et al., 2015). Numerous
researchers (e.g. Ashley and Tuten, 2015; Yang et al., 2016) demonstrate how social media
(e.g. Facebook) can be leveraged to increase engagement behaviour of consumers. Available
literature focussed on traditional advertising frameworks for media orientation classification.
A little effort has been made addressing distinctive traits of social media as an interactive
channel (Labrecque, 2014). The effectiveness of different types of social media content for the
generation of consumer response has been discussed in the recent literature, for example,
comparison of social media contents effect with different orientation types (e.g. information-
oriented vs entertainment-oriented contents) (Cvijikj and Michahelles, 2013; Swani et al.,
2013). According to them, content effectiveness depends on product type. Some studies have
compared content effectiveness across different brand categories or products in anticipating
consumer response. No literature is available that highlights the content effectiveness in the
context of cultural differences. Therefore, in its current state, a gap is seen with regards to
the effectiveness of social media metrics with respect to cultural differences.
We argue in a general way that post characteristics (vividness and interactiv ity),
post contents (information and entertainment), post top position and corporate social
responsibility (CSR) communication are related to brand fan engagement in terms
of brand commitment, loyalty and brand recommendations (number of likes, number of
comments and number of shares). Cultural differences (country/location) play a
moderating role in checking the brand fan engagement effectiveness of post
characteristics, post contents, CSR communication and post top position in different
geographical locations. These relationships are illustrated in Figure 1. We discuss the
underlying reasoning and hypotheses formulation in the following.
2.1 Post characteristics
Post characteristics include vividness and interactivity, and their details are as follows.
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strategy
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