Effectiveness of incentivized social media campaigns for a Fortune 500 company’s brand

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to determine how best to build online advocates for a food company’s brand based on data available from the brand’s Facebook pages. Specific research objectives are to study examine whether incentivizing actions such as “liking,” sharing or commenting on a brand’s Facebook impacts the brand community’s sentiment and engagement with the brand, and whether such engagement is different for different actions (e.g. liking vs sharing). Design/methodology/approach To achieve the objectives of this research, sentiment analysis is performed on Facebook insight data from a Fortune 500 company, consisting of fans’ comments, shares and “likes” for promotional and fan posts pertaining to one of its brands. Paired samples t-tests are performed to assess differences in sentiment and engagement before and after each promotional post. Findings The results do not support a strong impact of promotional posts on overall sentiment. However, there is evidence in support of a positive impact of the campaigns on overall wall-level engagement with the brand. Moreover, the levels of engagement are not the same for all promotional posts. Rather, some posts resulted in much higher engagement levels than others, suggesting that not all incentivized campaigns are created equal. Research limitations/implications The study used the data from only one of company’s many brands. Therefore, similar studies on other brands are warranted. Practical implications Social networking sites are increasing in numbers, and more and more businesses are embracing social networks and/or blogs as part of their marketing platforms. Many companies offer coupons and incentives on social media to entice customers to engage with their social media platforms as well as buy products. The study results provide valuable insight into the effectiveness of different kinds of social media promotional campaigns, and can help managers decide which campaigns to implement to achieve specific objectives. Originality/value This research adds to the literature in two ways. First, it contributes to the limited literature on the effectiveness of incentivized social media campaign. Second, it contributes to the social media analytics literature by demonstrating how sentiment analysis can be used along with other statistical procedures to make sense of qualitative social media data.