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The COVID-19 lockdown severely impacted organizations in the cultural and tourist business as their products all of a sudden “disappeared”. This study aims to explore if and how the unexpected and disruptive nature of the pandemic accelerated the development of new communication strategies on their social media.

The study draws on data from 24 midsize cultural institutions and tourist attractions in Denmark over the first two months of the lockdown in 2020. Approximately 900 posts on Facebook were collected and analyzed through the netnographic method. The analysis followed a two-layered qualitative approach. First, open coding to identify typologies and enable a comparison with established strategies from the literature review. Then, an exploratory examination was conducted across the typologies.

Nine different content categories were identified in the data and subsequently assessed and discussed in relation to the literature on strategies and dialogic intentions. This resulted in the emergence of two new overarching strategies: hope and host.

While hope is particularly relevant in crisis situations, the utilization of employees in the host role presents an opportunity for further development and engagement. Further, the results call for future research that breaks with the traditional quest for ideal strategies for the benefit of exploring the notion of “strategic doers”.

The identification of the hope and host strategies, along with the analysis of content categories and their alignment with various strategic intentions, contributes to the existing knowledge in this field. Further, the classic perception of engagement as driven by explicit interaction and dialogue is also challenged.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of social media marketing on new venture performance utilizing Structure-Conduct-Performance (SCP) theory.

A survey approach was employed, and questionnaires were sent out to the representatives of new ventures established in the previous six years at the time of data collection. Measures were adapted from SCP theory and the measurement model examined. A total of 248 responses were analyzed using structural equation modelling (LISREL 11).

The results indicate that social media marketing capabilities have a positive impact on the marketing performance of new ventures through a mediating effect of social media marketing performance. Thus, social media marketing performance affects new venture performance through marketing performance.

This research supports the vitality of social media in the lives of new firms and the importance of social media when executing marketing activities. The perceptive measurement of social media marketing capabilities on the firm level can be useful for new ventures to evaluate their competencies related to social media, and thus help firms improve those capabilities over time.

This research contributes to the existing knowledge on linkages between social media marketing capabilities and new venture performance acknowledging the role of a turbulent market environment. Therefore, the recognition of industry structure articulated by a turbulent market environment, social media marketing capabilities and social media support for competitive marketing strategy answers the question of how social media marketing capabilities drive competitive marketing strategy and subsequently influence performance.

The paper aims to examine how employees influence their employer’s brand by applying Taylor’s (1999) six segment message strategy wheel in an employee influencer context.

The research uses a content analysis of employees’ public social media posts – including captions and images – to analyze the message strategies employees use to promote their employers.

While ego and social were popular message strategies in both the images and captions, the findings evidence the varying message strategies employees use in text-based versus image-based messages. Four “imagined audiences” of employee influencers are identified: current customers, prospective customers, current employees and prospective employees.

The research provides insight into how employees act as influencers in building their employer brand on social media.

A unique measurement tool is developed that can be used by companies and future researchers to decode employees’ online communications.

This research contributes to theory and practice in the following important ways. First, the research provides a modernization of an existing framework from an offline setting to an applied industry context in an online setting. Second, this research focuses on a subtype of social media influencer, the employee influencer, which is an underdeveloped area of research. Third, a unique measurement tool to analyze text-based and image-based social media data is developed that can be used by companies and future researchers to decode employees’ online communications.

Today, social media is counted as an integral part of marketing strategies, which has led to a paradigm change in this field. As reported, social media marketing has been growing over the recent five years and is predicted to be exponentially growing in the future. However, despite the huge promise and intention to adopt social media marketing strategies by organisations, there remain challenges regarding the successful implementation of these new marketing programmes. Accordingly, marketing managers’ awareness of the success factors of social media marketing is essential to return investment in this area. Due to the little research been accomplished in this field, this paper aims to identify the success factors of social networks’ marketing and to rank the factors by using of interval best-worst method (BWM).

To serve the research aims, an extant literature review is accomplished and a focus group approach is conducted to identify the main success factors and sub-factors. To analyse the focus group discussions, a qualitative content analysis approach is applied. Interval BWM is used to calculate the weights of each identified factor.

In the final framework, six main success criteria, including strategy, process, technology, content, performance evaluation and people are identified, for each sub-criteria are developed. The interval BWM results suggest the content criterion as the most important success factor in developing a social media marketing strategy.

First, this research provides a comprehensive insight into the success factors and best practices of social media marketing. This is the first to draw on the critical factors affecting the success of social media marketing, considering people in the organisation such as top management, employees and customers, strategy, process and performance evaluation focussing on the change management requirements for applying social media marketing and technology as the technical factor of the adoption process, simultaneously. Identifying critical success factors of social media marketing will help marketing managers to avoid falling into the trap of developing social media strategies based on less important areas and ignoring the critical ones. Besides, owing to the limited resources of organisations in implementing social media marketing strategies, prioritising and weighing the success factors will lead to a focus on more important areas.

Whilst the related studies have mostly concentrated on the capabilities and activities required to conduct social media marketing and the few research investigated the critical success factors most concentrated on the customer and the content-related factors, the finding of this research goes beyond that and suggests technical, process and human aspects simultaneously in the implementation process in a holistic view.

This study aims to examine how message strategy influences consumer behavioral engagement in social media. To this end, the study develops a comprehensive typology of branded content in social media and tests for its effect on consumer behavioral engagement.

A sample of brand posts derived from the official Facebook pages of top corporate brands was double-coded using an elaborate coding instrument. Message strategy was operationalized using three main message strategies (i.e. informational, transformational and interactional) and their paired combinations. Consumer behavioral engagement was operationalized using consumer actions of liking and sharing brand posts. Proposed relationships were tested with MANCOVA and univariate ANOVAs.

Results indicate that the transformational message strategy is the most powerful driver of consumer behavioral engagement, while no significant difference is observed between the informational and the interactional message strategies. Further, complementing the informational and interactional message strategies with the transformational message strategy markedly enhances their effectiveness.

Useful managerial guidance to develop effective message strategies is offered. In particular, the importance of transformational messages, both as a standalone and a complementary message strategy, is underscored. By mastering and deploying transformational messages more frequently in their social media communication, marketers could improve their effectiveness.

Drawing on a theory-driven typology, this study sheds light on how message strategy shapes consumer behavioral engagement in a social media context. Importantly, the study documents pioneering empirical evidence regarding the effect of combined message strategies on consumer behavioral engagement.

This study examined whether individuals' coping strategies and their motivations for social media use act as mediators between actual COVID-19-related stress and the perception that social media use can reduce stress.

This study empirically develops and tests a research model with data (N = 503) collected through Amazon Mechanical Turk. A path analysis was used to test the research model.

The path analysis indicated that active coping initiated by individuals under COVID-19-related stress was more likely to be associated with information and social interaction needs, leading the individuals to perceive the use of social media as the cause for stress reduction. The expressive support coping strategy motivated the individuals under stress to seek social interaction, leading individuals to perceive that activities on social media reduced their stress during the pandemic. Emotional venting and avoidance coping strategies significantly impacted escape, social interaction, and entertainment seeking by allowing individuals to get absorbed in social media activities and forget unpleasant thoughts associated with the pandemic.

No previous study has explored the relationship between decisions around the type of coping strategy used and motivations for media usage, which leads to stress reduction. Understanding how stress-induced coping strategies influence social media users' specific motivations and reduce users' stress levels would help communicators understand how users' can encourage individuals to cope with stress by presenting individuals with more effective social media, resulting in stress reduction and improved well-being.

This study aims to investigate how business-to-business (B2B) companies use message strategies on social media platform and how these strategies are effective in improving customer perceived value and encouraging customer engagement, as well as how B2B companies differ from business-to-customer (B2C) counterparts in terms of utilization and effectiveness of social media message strategy.

Based on content analysis of Sina Weibo brand pages and survey of website visitors, this paper examines the differences of social media message strategies and their impacts upon customer perceived value and customer engagement between B2B and B2C companies.

B2B companies use more rational appeals and less emotional appeals, have lower degree of informativeness and perform better in interactivity and variety than B2C companies. These five dimensions of message strategy have different roles in engaging customers via perceived value across B2B and B2C settings.

The research makes significant contributions to B2B social media marketing literature by answering two interrelated questions, namely, “What companies are doing?” and “What companies should do?” on social media websites. Besides, it provides insightful implications for B2B companies on how to implement appropriate message strategies in their social media marketing efforts by conducting Importance-Performance Analysis.

Contemporary businesses face rapidly evolving changes and complexities that challenge their respective managerial responses and capabilities. The natures of information and communication systems, ways of doing business, knowledge-transfer methods, diffusion channels of innovation, and industrial habitus are shifting. Additionally, methods, concepts, and frameworks to study these challenges need to be in accordance.

Many of these features characterizing the new business environment influence not only the consumer business, but also the business-to-business (B2B) sectors and their ways of functioning. Interestingly, the influence also connects domestic with international business through the global connectedness. This is particularly visible in marketing communication, as the difference between domestic and international business communication has further diminished due to digital and virtual dimensions and applications. In this new age, it is assumed that new ventures and small- and medium-sized enterprises can turn their vulnerabilities and size constraints into competitive advantages by addressing these challenges with efficient social media usage. To address this technology-enabled dimension of B2B relations, the authors present a case study illustrating how a firm advances its relationship management and communication by introducing social media instruments. The study contributes to relationship management and international marketing communication and provides new insights into the workings of social media within the B2B context.

While a great amount of literature has focused on the relationship between communication strategies and corporate reputation, there is no systematic research on the different kinds of social media communication strategies. Based on the corporate reputation and social media literature, this paper aims to contribute to this gap in the research in two main ways. First identifying which social media communication strategy is more effective with contrasting levels of reputations; second, analyzing the differences between high- and low-reputation companies with respect to their ability to use corporate communication.

This paper uses a longitudinal explorative multiple-case study and theoretical sampling. The research setting is the Italian insurance context. The focus of this analysis on one medium, Facebook, because it is the most exploited in the context of the Italian insurance sector.

Six complementary social media communication strategies were identified: egocentric, conversational, selective, openness, secretive and supportive. The results also reveal distinct ways in which high-, medium- and low-reputation companies’ utilize the six complementary strategies of communications.

The study is based on a single industry and on one single geographical market, and care should thus be taken in generalizing the findings to other contexts. Therefore emerges the opportunity to broaden this research to other similar service sector, such as banking, to assess and generalize the results obtained. In addition, a possible direction of research, especially from a methodological standpoint, should investigate companies from different countries. Such a comparative study would examine in depth whether and to what extent the institutional framework may impact on communication strategies implemented by companies. This study only analyzed one social media (Facebook); hence, we cannot draw firm conclusions about what may constitute a successful social media communication strategy.

From this study, managers can learn how to combine the six communication strategies to have an effective impact on the corporate reputation. They can also learn how the number of interactions and the time taken to respond to questions from customers improve the corporate reputation and provide communication that is more effective.

This research extends the previous literature on corporate reputation and corporate communication, showing the relationship between them in a social media context and providing different strategies of managing this combination.

This study aims to examine the theoretical links among three important variables by empirically testing the cases of two international brands.

By using a comparative case study design, this study conducts a content analysis of a total of 490 Facebook comments regarding online confrontational crises: Dolce & Gabbana’s photo fiasco and Laneige’s discriminative sales incident.

The findings suggest that when evaluating whether or not a company has shouldered responsibility in online confrontational crises, social media users tend to be more influenced by how timely, active and consistent the organization’s reaction is than by the organization’s mere use of concession crisis communication strategies (CCSs). The individual-level perception (perceived degree of organizational crisis responsibility-taking) is a stronger predictor of social media users’ reaction than organization strategies. The earlier that social media user has a perceived improvement in the organization, the more effective is the organization’s strategy to minimize the effects of social media as crisis mobilizer.

This study confirms theories formulated in a Western context with actual cases from Eastern cultures. Theoretically, this study sheds light on the importance of the individual-level perception for effective use of organization strategy in crisis. This study also suggests the relative significance of positive forms of crisis response, concessions CCSs and their relationship with the perceived degree of crisis responsibility-taking.