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Social media platforms, which enable firms and customers to interact on relatively equal footing, have become major touchpoints for enhancing customer engagement. Moreover, because firms can readily assess advertising performance in online media environments, it is necessary to examine the relationship between the quality of information posted on social media and its outcomes. Compared with firm-owned media such as firm websites, texts need to be short and straightforward on social media. Since the length of text that can be communicated to customers at one time is limited, firms frequently use emojis in their social media communications to tell emotions. The present study quantified the emotional valence of emojis and textual content posted on social media and employed these measures as independent variables in a regression analysis using a fixed-effects model. The results indicate that incongruence increases customer engagement. This finding is consistent with prior research in consumer behavior suggesting that incongruence enhances need for cognition. Furthermore, the analytical results provide practical implications, indicating that the use of emojis and text should be adjusted according to the firm’s communication objectives. ● The results of the analysis of the degree of congruence between emojis and textual sentiment showed that in social media communication, the less congruent the emotional information between emojis and text, the better the results for customer engagement. ● The results of the study support advertising research that has found that firms obtain better performance when brand image and communication are not matched because incongruence activates consumers’ need for cognition. ● Using real posts from firm or brand accounts on Twitter (X), we conducted an analysis via a fixed effect regression model to control for firm heterogeneity and obtained robust results. ● The use of emojis and text depends on the purpose of firm communication. Our results imply that text and emoji sentiment should not be matched if a firm’s goal is to capture the attention of its customers.
Tanaka et al. (Fri,) studied this question.