Do Facebook Likes Lead to Shares or Sales? Exploring the Empirical Links between Social Media Content, Brand Equity, Purchase Intention, and Engagement

Prior studies report organizations' increasing fiscal investments in social media marketing communications reflecting anticipated benefits for bottomline improvements. Yet, few studies have looked at the empirical link between messaging dimensions, brand equity, consumer engagement and associated purchase intentions. Through a four-week long, between-group longitudinal experiment, we assess the relationships between these factors, and produce the following contributions: (i) developed and empirically supported our proposed monitoring metric, Brand Social Media Engagement Index, (ii) observed that brand equity is a full, direct mediator between engaging brand content and both purchase intention and brand social media engagement intention, and (iii) demonstrated the positive effect of engaging brand content on consumer brand equity, thereby establishing the value behind brand social media marketing communications to consumers.