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What motivates consumer to engage in microblogs? The roles of brand post characteristics and brand prestige

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Abstract

Microblogs have gained concerns from both academics and practitioners owing to their great potential for communication and diffusion. Brand managers can release posts containing photo, video, and hashtags besides a short text on microblog platforms. This study concentrates on the influence of explicit characteristics in brand post (i.e., photo, video, hashtags, and brand personality traits) on consumer engagement (i.e., number of likes, comments, and shares of brand post). Furthermore, we propose that brand prestige moderates the relationships between brand post characteristics and consumer engagement. We examine these hypotheses with a dataset that includes more than 250,000 brand posts across about 70 brands’ official accounts collected from the platform Sina Weibo, the largest and most popular microblog platform in China. Our research yields interesting findings that uncover the relationships among different characteristics of brand post and consumer engagement under different levels of brand prestige. We conclude the paper by highlighting its theoretical and practical contributions.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the Major Program of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (91846201), the Foundation for Innovative Research Groups of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (71521001), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (71801069, 71722010, 91746302, 71872060).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Management, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei, 230009, Anhui, China

    Xiumin Chu, Yezheng Liu, Xiayu Chen, Zhengping Ding & Shouzheng Tao

  2. Key Laboratory of Process Optimization and Intelligent Decision Making, Ministry of Education, Hefei, 230009, Anhui, China

    Xiumin Chu, Yezheng Liu, Xiayu Chen, Zhengping Ding & Shouzheng Tao

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  1. Xiumin Chu
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Appendices

Appendix 1

See Tables 6 and 7.

Table 6 Means, standard deviation, and correlations
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Table 7 VIF values of ln(likes), ln(comments) and ln(shares)
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Appendix 2

See Tables 8 and 9.

Table 8 Endogeneity test
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Table 9 Summary statistics of first-stage regression
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Appendix 3

See Table 10.

Table 10 IV-Tobit regression and 2SLS estimations (with alternative measures of consumer engagement)
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Chu, X., Liu, Y., Chen, X. et al. What motivates consumer to engage in microblogs? The roles of brand post characteristics and brand prestige. Electron Commer Res 22, 451–483 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10660-020-09435-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10660-020-09435-y

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