Reading the room to launch the right campaign at the right time: Using social media conversations to maximize campaign engagement.
(A2026-134077)

AUTHORS

Sumon Chaudhuri, WU Vienna; Madhav Arora, ESSEC Business School; Arnaud De Bruyn, ESSEC Business School; Marc Mazodier, ESSEC Business School; Raoul Kübler, ESSEC Business School

ABSTRACT

In today's digital landscape, organizations face the critical challenge of selecting the right campaign at the right time to maximize engagement. One possible solution to this problem is to look at social media conversations related to their campaign topics in order to determine what would resonate with their audience. However, the literature provides no guidelines on how to do this in a dynamic social media landscape where multiple topics compete for attention. Using Greenpeace France's email campaigns and scraped Twitter conversations mentioning Greenpeace during the same period, we provide a modelling approach that shows how topics of public discourse affects engagement, and helps managers optimize message timing using a simple heuristic. We find that topic salience (the salience of a topic in the minds of the campaign audience) has an inverted U-shaped effect on engagement, suggesting that capitalizing on social media discourse is not straightforward.