What drives social media engagement? - according to 17 researches
In a survey of more than 1,500 marketers, 72% said that their top objective for social media was to produce more engaging content, and 65% said that their second-highest priority was to increase their understanding of the kinds of content that work best. These objectives are in line with the researcher’s goal to identify the elements that motivate social media marketing participation. Numerous scholars have examined certain parts of this issue from various angles, but thorough study into the traits of powerful posts is still lacking. We went into further detail about the present state of research in these fields and separated the qualities that may affect engagement into three categories: creator, context, and content.
Attributes of the Creator
For particular social media groups, many researchers have examined creator-related characteristics (such as the creator’s number of followers, age, and sex). For instance, Suh et al. discovered (not unexpectedly) that the quantity of followers and followers has an impact on the frequency of retweeting on Twitter. Age and experience both affect engagement.
Arguello et al. discovered that newcomers had a lower chance of receiving a reply to their posts on online groups. The same appears to be true for Twitter, where older accounts receive more retweets. Another aspect that affects participation on social media platforms is the account holder’s gender.For instance, Gilbert et al. found in their research of Pinterest users that while men have more followers overall than women do, they receive fewer repins than women do.
Contextual aspects
The majority of the study on contextual elements (such time and location), has been done by practitioners and published. For instance, TrackMaven’s analysis of 123 US Fortune 500 firms’ Instagram posts revealed that Sunday is the best day of the week for publishing and that the time of day has no impact on the quantity of interactions. Similar to this, Ellering collected and examined sixteen social media research but found no best time to post.
Attributes of the content
Textual, visual, and audio material are the three types of content. Numerous researchers have looked into how popular the text is. According to Berger and Milkman’s analysis of New York Times articles, messages that incorporate high-arousal negative emotions (such as anger or worry) and positive emotions (such as awe) are more likely to become viral than those that simply contain other types of emotions.
Similar to this, Lee et al. found that persuasive content (such as emotional or charitable content) boosts engagement while informative content (such as information about a product’s prices, availability, or features) decreases engagement when used alone but boosts engagement when combined with some persuasive content.
Burke et al. studied textual discourse in the online community context and discovered that a short group or topic introduction in messages increases community response. In a later study, Burke and Kraut found that politeness increases the number of replies in technical groups, but rudeness is more effective in generating replies in political groups. Arguello et al reported that posting on topic, introducing oneself, asking questions, and using simple language and shorter text increased replies in an online community. Another prevailing trend in social media is the use of hashtags and URLs. For example, hashtags and URLs on Twitter have strong relationships with retweets.
A Facebook content research, however, discovered that the quantity of links in a post reduces the amount of comments.
The posts from Fortune 500 firms that employ more than eleven hashtags, according to TrackMaven, receive the highest interactions.
When Adobe compared social media posts with and without visual material, it discovered that postings with photos engage audiences on social media the best.
Conclusion
Besides immediately using the insights we gained from our analysis, these can be can be used in commercial situations to enhance the impact of social media efforts and boost contact with potential consumers. For instance, our results and strategy can enable corporations and influence marketers to produce more appealing commercials and successful marketing campaigns by designing engaging content and identifying influential creators and contexts
