Social media engagement and real-time marketing: Using net-effects and set-theoretic approaches to understand audience and content-related effects

Abstract

This study examines how various audience-related variables and distinct real-time marketing contents (i.e., predictable and unpredictable real-time marketing) affect social media engagement. The relations are tested using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), with a convenience sample that was obtained via conducting three online consumer surveys for several different brands. The SEM findings show that intensity of social media usage, self-brand congruence, and brand-real-time marketing moment congruence are all significant in explaining total engagement. Only self-brand and brand-moment congruence are relevant with predictable real-time marketing content, whereas only brand-moment congruence is significant with unpredictable real-time marketing. On the other hand, the FsQCA findings show various conditional configurations for both the presence and absence of engagement in each content context, where the individual variables need to be combined with others. The results also show that brand-moment congruence is more important to explain engagement with unpredictable content in comparison to other variables, and that differences thus exist with distinct content strategies. This research enriches engagement and real-time marketing lit.erature and the findings can assist content managers in the selection of social media content and in building more profitable consumer-brand relations.