Content strategies and audience response on Facebook brand pages

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyse Facebook brand posts along dimensions of vividness, interactivity, novelty, brand consistency and content type and tests how these characteristics influence audience response in terms of liking and sharing brand posts. Design/methodology/approach – The sample comprised 191 brand posts sourced from the Facebook brand pages of five top selling automotive brands in the UK. Audience response was operationalised using brand post likes and brand post shares, while brand post characteristics were operationalised according to relevant theory. Poisson regression models were tested to measure the effect of brand post characteristics on audience response. Findings – The findings indicate that brand post vividness has a significant positive effect on brand post shares, but not on brand post likes. Brand post interactivity has a significant negative effect on both brand post likes and brand post shares. Brand post novelty and brand post consistency have a significant positive effect on both brand post likes and brand post shares. Finally, brand post content type has a significant positive effect on brand post likes, but not brand post shares. Practical implications – The findings underscore the need for marketers to develop a systematic content strategy for Facebook brand pages. With this in mind, the study proposes several evidence based suggestions. Originality/value – This study contributes to the literature first by synthesising and testing brand post characteristics that were overlooked in prior research and second by developing theoretically consistent operationalisation for already familiar brand post characteristics. These enhancements resulted in a final model with a superior explanatory power.