Proceedings of 21st International Business Research Conference
10 - 11 June, 2013, Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada, ISBN: 978-1-922069-25-2
Is Having Consumers “Like” You Enough? A Content Analysis
of Engagement on Facebook
Amy L. Parsons
This paper examines how companies use social media in their marketing
strategies by content analyzing the official Facebook timelines of ten global
brands over a one month period. Timelines are evaluated in terms of the
number of consumers who “like” the brand, the type of content posted on
the timelines and on the level of engagement with each post during the
time period. The posts on the timelines are analyzed in terms of how they
utilize a framework developed by Kietzmann et. al. (2011) that identifies
seven functional building blocks of social media: identity, presence,
relationships, conversations, groups, reputation, and sharing. Results
suggest that while many companies have millions of consumers who “like”
them the level of engagement is much lower which suggests that
companies need to improve the quality and nature of their postings on
Facebook to more actively engage consumers.
Field: Marketing
______________________________________
Dr. Amy Parsons, Department of Business and Management, King's College, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania,
United States, amyparsons@kings.edu,