Unpacking social media engagement: Exploring the role of message strategy and contextual dynamics

To clarify the relationships between marketing strategy messages and customer engagement, this paper proposes and tests a holistic framework, including a typology of message categories (functional versus emotional), and examines how product type (utilitarian versus hedonic) and firm type (business-to-consumer versus business-to-business) affect digital user engagement. The paper analyses 103 brands collected from the Twitter (now X) social media posts. Using the official Twitter application programming interface and specific filtering criteria, the authors obtain tweets related to each brand, including original tweets, retweets, quotes and replies. The results show that advertising message types exert different effects on customer engagement on social media. In particular, the impact of functional messages on customer engagement is more significant for utilitarian products than hedonic products. This paper offers essential managerial guidance and recommended practices for effective social media marketing strategies on platforms such as Twitter. The paper also provides novel, practical insights into enhancing customer engagement in the social media context. This article is also included in The Business & Management Collection which can be accessed at https://hstalks.com/business/.