Understanding consumer engagement with brand posts on social media: The effects of post linguistic styles

Abstract Creating brand posts that stimulate consumer engagement on social media is both vital and challenging to digital marketers. Despite previous research on this topic, to date, little is known about how the linguistic styles of brand posts influence consumer engagement. Based on the communication accommodation theory, brand anthropomorphism literature, and linguistic research, this paper examined the effects of three brand post linguistic styles, namely, emotionality, complexity, and informality, on consumer engagement. Through analyzing the 15,396 brand posts collected from 104 Facebook pages, we found that the linguistic styles of brand posts can impact consumer engagement, but the effects vary regarding the three consumer engagement behaviors (i.e., like, share, comment). The findings of this paper improve our understanding of the role that language plays in brand-consumer communications on social media as well as provide guidelines for social media marketers on how to design engaging brand posts from the perspective of linguistics.