Environmental factors to maximize social media engagement: A comprehensive framework

Social media is a crucial tool for companies to reach their customers as additional touch point and build brand awareness, but effectively using these platforms to engage with customers remains an area of research. Branded social media posts are aimed to deepen the customer-brand-relationship in form of social media engagement. In this study, we aim to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the factors that influence social media engagement by examining the role of environmental factors, including the type of media and content of brand posts, brand involvement of the company, social media channel used, and cross-channel management strategies. We utilize social cognitive theory as our framework and identify three social media environments that must be considered to create social media engagement: (1) the imposed, (2) the selected, and (3) the created environment. We gather more than 7000 brand posts of twenty global brands using Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram giving insights on the driver of social media engagement. By examining these factors, we aim to provide a framework for understanding the drivers of social media engagement and how companies can effectively use social media to engage with their customers.