Emotionally-rich brand post and consumer sociability behavior on Facebook: what does really work?

Recently, social network sites (SNSs) have become extremely popular and play an important role in the everyday lives of consumers. Empowered by SNSs, a consumer has become more active and spend more time with their family, friends or even companies online. Companies may communicate and exchange product or service-related information with consumers on official company’s Facebook page. Therefore companies seek to encourage online conversations for several beneficial outcomes such as building and maintaining a relationship with their consumers, achieving consumer loyalty. Hence, companies not only need to gain a better understanding of consumer sociability behavior but also need to understand what emotional cues of brand posts encourage consumer sociability behaviors on Facebook brand page. The purpose of this paper is to explore the emotional features of brand posts and media types that facilitate different consumer sociability behaviors on Facebook. This study used liking, commenting and sharing behavior and diverse emoji reactions (e.g., love, haha) as a sociability behavior measures of consumer engagement. This study follows neuromarketing approach and uses a mixed-methods research followed by an analysis of content and text performed with the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) Software, and emotions in photos by using FaceReader Software. A content analysis of 1, 821 brand posts was conducted from the hotel brand Facebook pages of 18 brands during one year from 30th of June in 2017 and reverse order. The results demonstrated that the number of liking, love, haha, wow, sharing can be facilitated by images. Brand post with emoticons and emoji generate liking behavior on Facebook. Findings indicate that the number of likes, love can be increased by emotionally-rich images. Brand post accompanied with social words exhibits liking behavior.