The Platform Revolution in Interactive Marketing: Increasing Customer-Brand Engagement on Social Media Platforms

Customer-brand engagement is considered to be an important perspective in interactive marketing. However, there has been limited analysis of social media itself as a determinant of customer-brand engagement. Given the wide variety of social media platforms currently in use, our understanding of customer-brand engagement would benefit from further exploration of the different and new social media platforms. Therefore, this chapter examines the effectiveness of customer-brand engagement on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok through data mining. The findings reveal that TikTok, an emerging social media platform, has higher customer-brand engagement than Twitter and Instagram, despite the latter being larger platforms and widely used by brands. More importantly, this chapter shows that customer-brand engagement on social media platforms can be increased by the choice of social media platform and brand content format, rather than brand content differentiation on social media platforms. As a result, this chapter fills a gap in the limited analysis of customer-brand engagement on social media platforms, and provides managerial insights for brand and marketing practitioners who have difficulty coordinating their efforts on different social media platforms.