Journal Article

Understanding User-Generated Content and Customer Engagement on Facebook Business Pages

Yang, Mochen, Adomavicius, Gediminas, Ren, Yuqing

2019

Overview

With the growth and prevalence of social media platforms, many companies have been using them to engage with customers and encourage user-generated content about their products and services. In this paper, we analyze user-generated posts from the Facebook business pages of multiple companies across several industries to understand what users post on Facebook business pages and how post valence and content characteristics affect engagement, measured as the number of likes and comments received by a post. Our analysis demonstrates that negative posts are significantly more prevalent than positive posts, and negative posts also tend to attract more likes and more comments than positive posts. Importantly, engagement depends not only on the valence of a post but also on the specific post content. We observe three types of customer complaints respectively related to product and service quality, money issues, and corporate social responsibility issues. We show that social complaints receive more likes, but fewer comments, than quality or money complaints. Our findings reveal the practical challenges of managing Facebook business pages as a new channel of interacting with customers, and they highlight the need to explore effective response strategies to manage customer complaints and other service requests on social media. With the growth and prevalence of social media platforms, many companies have been using them to engage with customers and encourage user-generated content (UGC) about their products and services. However, there has not been much research on the characteristics of UGC on these platforms and, correspondingly, their impact on customer engagement. In this paper, we analyze user-generated posts from Facebook business pages of multiple companies to understand what users post on Facebook business pages and how post valence and content characteristics affect engagement, measured as the number of likes and comments received by a post. We control for a variety of factors, including post linguistic features, poster characteristics, and post context heterogeneity. Our analysis demonstrates that for user-generated posts on Facebook business pages, negative posts are significantly more prevalent than positive posts, which contrasts with the J-shaped valence distribution of online consumer reviews. We also show that engagement depends not only on the valence of a post but also on the specific ways in which a post is positive or negative. We observe three types of customer complaints, respectively, related to product and service quality, money issues, and social and environmental issues. Our analyses show that social complaints receive more likes, but fewer comments, than quality or money complaints. Such nuances can only be uncovered by analyzing the actual post content, going beyond the valence of the posts. Furthermore, we theoretically discuss and empirically demonstrate that liking and commenting are engagement behaviors with different antecedents. For example, positive posts tend to attract more likes yet fewer comments than neutral posts. Overall, our research shows that user-generated posts on Facebook business pages represent a distinctive form of UGC that is conceptually different from online consumer reviews. Our work advances the knowledge on UGC and has practical implications for firms’ social media marketing strategy.

• Publisher: INFORMS,Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences
• Subject: Business / Consumer behavior / customer engagement / Customer services / Customers / Digital media / Evaluation / Facebook / Information services / Marketing / Online information services / Online services / Quality of service architectures / Social media / Social networks / User generated content / Web site management software / word-of-mouth