Social Networking Sites as a Multimedia Tool for Brand Popularity – An Exploratory Study

Objectives: To identify the role of content richness (video, photo and link) and time frame of the brand publication (time and date) as factors of brand posts popularity. Methods/Statistical Analysis: The data of 1488 brand posts were collected from the Face book brand pages of five international mobile companies popular in India. For analyzing the data, multiple regressions were used as tool using SPSS software. Findings: The result showed that image has the highest impact on the brand popularity in terms of likes and comments and shares. On the other hand, the video contents significantly increase the volume of likes and shares but fail to attract more comments. Similarly, the provision of the link in the content shows significant but has a negative impact on likes as it carries users to another page. But the link is significant in terms of attracting shares. The time of brand post- publication (non-working hour) is significant in terms of likes but has got negative influence. On the other hand, it has no impact on comments and shares. Finally, the result shows that the day of the brand posts publication (workdays) significantly increases the volume of comments, whereas, for likes and shares, the study did not find any support. Application/Improvements: This paper suggests strategies for brand posts popularity on Facebook which might be helpful for the Indian marketers and contributes to the existing literature on the management of marketing strategies for consumer engagement on social networking sites.