How do Fortune firms build a social presence on social media platforms? Insights from multi-modal analytics

The exponential growth in the usage of social media platforms (SMPs) has brought most of us to a virtual space that is nowadays also being shared by firms. Firms regularly communicate over SMPs to elevate consumers' social media experience. With the theoretical underpinning of social presence theory, we have deduced a model that maps multimodal features of Firm-Generated Content (FGC) across three different levels of customer engagement (CE). The model has been empirically tested with Facebook image posts of business-to-consumer companies from the list of Fortune 100 companies of the year 2018. This longitudinal study has also been designed to identify the changes in social media communication due to the pandemic. Our contribution lies in modelling those textual and visual features of FGC that reflect the three different dimensions of social presence. We have used machine learning algorithms to automate the assessment of the experience of social presence. Ultimately, the paper offers social media post design strategies for effective communication and future directions for social media researchers.

Automated summary

This study models the features of Firm-Generated Content (FGC) on social media platforms and offers post design strategies for effective communication. It provides insights for future directions in social media research.