The Impact of Influence Tactics on Customer Engagement in Brand Messaging
(A2024-119389)

AUTHORS

Guowei Huang, Alliance Manchester Business School, University of Manchester; Hai-Anh Tran, Alliance Manchester Business School; Heiner Evanschitzky, Alliance Manchester Business School The University of Manchester

ABSTRACT

As social media platforms increasingly supplant traditional marketing methods, a significant challenge for companies is developing content that effectively engages customers. Despite the substantial research on content-related factors influencing customer engagement, the comprehensive exploration of influence tactics in this context remains incomplete. This study extends the influence tactics literature to brand messaging in social media. We develop a machine learning framework to analyze a dataset of 893,222 brand-related tweets, empirically showing that internalization, compliance, and ingratiation tactics can enhance customer engagement. Specially, moderate cross-message compositions with different tactics enhance customer engagement the most and the effectiveness of compliance and ingratiation tactics are amplified during weekends. Our findings offer practical guidance for content managers on creating more attractive brand messages by utilizing influence tactics.