The effects of social media posts’ characteristics on customer engagement: Evidence from WeChat

Many companies are using social media as emerging marketing channels in hopes of encouraging engagement by customers. This study explored the effect of multiple social media post cues on customer engagement. By distinguishing WeChat posts' characteristics into outer- and inner-layer features, the findings suggest that outer-layer features (title linguistic vividness and top position) have positive effects on reads, and inner-layer features (post vividness and containing user-generated content) encouraged more likes, shares, and comments. In addition, by assigning post contents into sales and non-sales-related categories, we found the former attracts more comments and the latter is more helpful in promoting likes and shares. Further, within sales-related posts, storytelling category will receive more likes, whereas functional category boosts the number of shares.