EXPRESS: Getting the Recipe Right: How Content Combinations Drive Social Media Engagement Behaviors

Social media has become a key touchpoint in contemporary customer journeys. Consequently, prior studies have investigated how social media content drives outcomes. However, much of this research has focused on the design of individual, isolated content elements, paying limited attention to how individuals respond to their holistic combinations. Drawing on multimodality, this study investigates how combinations of content elements drive social media engagement behaviors (SMEBs), a critical social media outcome. Through a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis with 516 Instagram stories, the findings reveal four content element configurations that can drive high SMEBs: the loud, the informative, the affective, and the relational. These findings contribute to the literature by demonstrating that multiple configurations of content elements can simultaneously drive SMEBs, thus challenging the dominant view in the literature, which has focused on the effectiveness of isolated elements on diverse outcomes.