Abstract
This research explores how wine brands communicate to consumers via Facebook. It investigates how online communication facilitates customer engagement. The results show a large disparity between the content delivered by brands, and the times in which wine consumers are more likely to engage. While wine brands appear to post most content from 5 to 7pm, users are most likely to engage prior to midday. Similarly, the greatest number of posts are delivered on Thursdays, however Facebook fans were found to engage more over the weekend; at a time closely aligned with wine purchase and consumption The results also demonstrate a very low level of engagement among fans. On average, only 10% of Facebook fans engage with the brand. This finding indicates that brands have not been successful in facilitating high levels of engagement amongst fans; the work presented here is intended to assist wine brands increase this effect.
Summary
Although practitioners are constantly developing strategies and models to drive customer engagement in social media, empirically tested strategies for exactly how to enhance engagement have not been tested. This research used a large scale quantitative study to test exactly how wine brands communicate on Facebook, and what effect this communication has on how wine consumers engage with the brand. In order to understand consumer engagement with brands on Facebook, we tested 6 specific types of ‘social media engagement behaviour’. This behaviour includes various actions such as commenting, contributing (through ‘liking’ and ‘sharing’ content), consuming (by reading content and clicking on photos or watching videos), remaining dormant, detaching (unliking the page, hiding posts) and finally, destructing (writing negative comments).
In order to derive the results, the research process included in-depth interviews with social media managers at Australian wineries, focus groups with wine consumers around Australia and quantitative analysis of Facebook Insights data from 12 active branded Facebook pages over a 12 month period, to yield a total of 2,236 social media posts. The results indicated a large disparity regarding content delivery and engagement timing. For example, we found a sharp increase in the average number of engagement actions between 7am and 11am.Interestingly, wine brands rarely deliver Facebook posts at this time of the day. Rather, most of their posts are scheduled for 5 to 7pm.
Similarly, we also investigated post timing with respect to the day of the week in which a post is made. Very few posts were delivered by wine brands on Fridays and Saturdays. However, we found that posts are significantly more likely to be ‘shared’ on Fridays (average of 49 shares per post).
Through the use of Facebook data, this study implemented a formula through which to calculate the percentage of users who exhibit dormancy and engagement rates. The dormancy rate refers to the number of people who see the post (organic reach) but make no engagement actions such as commenting, liking, sharing, reading, clicking and so on, i.e. they remain ‘dormant’. The results also show that on average, 90% of fans who see a wine brands post will remain dormant. Hence, 10% of fans are expected to engage with the post. The results provide some benchmarking data for specific engagement actions. For example, the average number of comments of a post is 2, the average number of ‘likes’ on a post is 22. The average number of link clicks was 2, and the average number of photo views is 17.
The results provide specific guidelines for the use of informational, entertaining, remunerative and relational content in order to successfully influence positive engagement behaviour among brand fans. The quantitative survey work on communication orientation shows which types of communication had more effect on consumers in terms of measures such as ‘wanting to know more about the wine’, ‘wanting to visit the cellar door’, ‘attitude to the brand’ and wine knowledge in general. This gives solid insight to wine brand managers seeking to use social media to generate brand effects.