Social networking sites have become a compelling tool for brands to engage with their customers. With today’s all-time-connected status, customers can easily approach brands with their questions, wishes or concerns about the particular product or service, as well as share their personal experience with the brand with other consumers. Brands now have a lot more opportunities to foster customer relationship, but on the other hand, social media has forced brands to rethink their traditional one-way marketing, and strategically choose new tactics that can help them to enhance higher customer engagement.
In this paper, we empirically analyze 226,470 customer and 18,089 brand tweets of 14 international and US car brands that actively use Twitter as a means to engage with their customers and fans. Data is collected from 21st October, 2015 to 31st of May, 2016. Results show that active and fast-responding brands stimulate higher engagement by customers. Moreover, characteristics of the post created by brands, namely vividness and interactivity of the post, play important role in engaging customers. The brand page managers can benefit from our research findings by applying them in their daily use of Twitter and other social media outlets.
