Page 287 - MARSIUM'21 COMP OF PAPER

The analysis revealed that social media platforms, specifically Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter were used as tools to engage and interact
with their consumers because brand regularly posted at least one post every single day. Social media platforms were used by brands not only
to promote their products, but also to disseminate information considering brands also announce the re-opening of their physical store,
employment opportunities, and lists of their top resellers through their social media postings.

Despite the fact that brands are for the most part, use photos or images along with their social media postings, the results still suggest that
the utilization of videos which was identified as high vividness in this study, will undoubtedly generate higher engagement metrics from
users. This might be the reason why Instagram that facilitates a wide range of media richness features including reels and IGTV, has received
a great number of engagement metrics from social media users.

The findings indicate that even though the final sample are mostly made up from posts with no interactivity, the results appear to favor posts
with high interactivity as these posts effectively generate high corresponding engagement metrics as regards to the number of likes,
comments, and views. However, on the contrary with results from previous study from Moran et al. (2020) and Hamzah et al. (2021) that
presents high interactivity will result in high engagement metrics, this study signifies that posts with no interactivity lead to the high number
of shares and retweet by social media users. But then again, as mentioned earlier, it could be because of the sheer volume of posts with no
interactivity that made it into the final sample of this study. Additionally, it is fascinating to see how Twitter users use the comment section
to join in the conversation under other users’ tweets, and ‘quoting’ tweet to express their own opinions. Hence, it is possible that the high
number of retweets in this study attributed to posts with no interactivity.

In the final analysis, this research endeavored to acknowledge the importance of the type of platform being selected in facilitating consumers’
engagement behavior. The results of this study demonstrate that Instagram users appear to like and comment more frequently than those on
Facebook and Twitter. In the aftermath of removing Instagram as a criterion for evaluation, Facebook users are more likely to leave
comments than Twitter users who tend to demonstrate greater engagement behavior in the form of liking.

5.2 RESEARCH LIMITATIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

This paper examined the literature of social media content and consumers’ engagement behavior to develop conceptual model that proposes
two main social media content format; vividness and interactivity, and explores how the selection of social media platform effect
corresponding engagement metrics of brand’s posts. Using a dataset of 1,011 social media posts with corresponding 77,989 total of likes,
26,897 total of comments, 326 total of shares, 690,174 total of views, and 1,871 total of retweets based on two local skincare brands,
researcher demonstrate significant results as proposed in the research questions.

The dataset utilized in this study is, however, limited to the sample selection as this study only collect data from the three months period of
time as compared to previous research that employ at least eight months up until one year period of data collection. Due to the lack of
manpower and researcher’s limited time frame, sample selection of three months seems best fit into researcher’s capabilities to collect the
data. However, according to the aforementioned statement, the results might bias the posts with specific features collected as a final sample
in this study. An example shown from this study would be, the corresponding engagement metrics appear to favor posts with no interactivity
simply because these type of posts were the most prevalent in this sample. Future research could then limit the total of postings with specified
features collected as a final sample ensuring that the number of posts for each level of content format is consistent.

This study focuses solely in consumers’ engagement behaviors in terms of liking, commenting, sharing, viewing, and retweeting that limited
to acts within social media platforms. Further research in this study may wish to investigate other forms of engagement through social media
(e.g., collaborations), as well as other dimensions of engagement including novelty, consistency and content type that might contribute
significantly to the finding of the study regarding consumers’ engagement behavior.

Due to the secondary nature of this dataset, researcher is unable to consider and investigate the profiles of users (e.g., demographic factors)
who engage with posts since the collection of data from survey research enables researcher to take a variety of potential sources of bias into
account. Due to the unavailability of this data, consumers who use Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are likely to have a self-selection bias.
These elements contribute significantly to the understanding of the types of users who engage across platforms that must be included in
future research to enable a more profound comprehension of engagement through a number of different social media platforms.

5.3 CONCLUSION

The purpose of this study was to determine the importance of social media format in terms of vividness and interactivity as well as the
selection of social media platforms in facilitating consumers’ engagement behavior. The findings of this study discovered that posts with
high vividness resulted in high engagement metrics of likes, comments, shares and views meanwhile on the other hand, posts with high
interactivity produce remarkable social media engagement in terms of users’ behavior of liking, commenting, and viewing. Most importantly,
this study also noted that Instagram significantly gets more corresponding engagement metrics of likes and comments compared to Facebook
and Twitter. The findings of this study will directly benefit marketers or small business owners of skincare brands in selecting the most
engaging social media platform and content format strategies.

265