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B2B brands on Twitter: Engaging users with a varying combination of social media content objectives, strategies, and tactics

Yes / The objective of this research is to increase understanding about B2B company-led user engagement on social
media content. Building on hierarchy-of-effects (HoE) theory, we explore how the world’s leading B2B companies
use content objectives (why), strategies (how), and tactics (what) on Twitter. We first integrate B2B
advertising and social media research on companies’ content objectives, strategies, and tactics. Then, using
qualitative analyses, we examine the existence of objectives, strategies, and tactics in the most engaging tweets
(N=365) of the worlds’ ten leading B2B brands, covering five industries, in 2017. Finally, we quantitatively
examine how the use of diverse objectives and strategies differs between the most engaging tweets (N=318)
and least engaging tweets (N=229) of the companies in 2018. The companies use objectives, strategies and
tactics that relate to creating awareness, knowledge and trust, interest, and liking in the majority of their most and
least engaging tweets, and express preference, conviction and purchase aspects much less. Differences exist in
general, industry-wise, and company-wise. The study is a rare attempt to integrate the extant B2B advertising
and social media research, and compare the most and least engaging B2B social media content.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:BRADFORD/oai:bradscholars.brad.ac.uk:10454/17022
Date2019 March 1921
CreatorsJuntunen, M., Ismagilova, Elvira, Oikarinen, E.-L.
Source SetsBradford Scholars
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeArticle, Accepted manuscript
Rights© 2020 The Authors. This is an Open Access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/BY-NC-ND/4.0/)

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