Content that engages your customers: the role of brand congruity and promotions in social media

Every day, social network users worldwide spend an average of 1 hour and 47 minutes on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube, and they forward online content to friends. Nonetheless, 87% of posts to brand Facebook pages go unanswered. To reduce this negative outcome and attract fans’ attention, companies post content that is not necessarily congruent with their brand and that contains promotion-based themes. The question is whether this strategy is effective in boosting rebroadcasting. The authors propose a conceptual framework that explains how two key post themes—congruency and promotions—influence consumers’ propensity to share and why. They validate it through a multimethod approach. First, the authors document the existence of the effect between congruency, promotions, and rebroadcasting by analyzing one year of posts for four leading brands. Second, the authors run a field experiment with Samsung Mobile. They find that the degree of congruency between online content and the brand positively affects the amount of rebroadcasting. Posts that include promotional incentives generate fewer shares, but this negative effect reverses when the post is congruent with the brand. Third, the authors conduct two online lab experiments to explain why this happens and show that fans’ reactance and altruistic motives play a central role.