Evaluating the Impact of Storytelling on B2B Social Media Engagement: An AI-driven Approach

Abstract

As Business-to-Business (B2B) social media continues to grow, understanding the impact of storytelling on user engagement becomes increasingly important. While prior research has explored narrative strategies in advertising and branding, researchers have paid scant attention to the specific influence of stories on social media user engagement. This study addresses this gap by employing Narrative Transportation Theory (NTT) and leveraging Natural Language Processing (NLP) to analyze the intricate textual data generated by social media platforms. The analysis of 85,075 Facebook publications from leading Canadian manufacturing companies, using Spearman's rank correlation coefficient, underscores that individual storytelling components - character, sequence of events, and setting - along with the composite narrative structure significantly enhance social media user engagement. This research contributes to a deeper understanding of storytelling dynamics in B2B social media, emphasizing the importance of crafting compelling stories to drive meaningful engagement in the digital realm.