Incentives and diffusion of social marketing messages on social media: an experimental study

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Abstract

Today companies take advantage of social media to engage consumers and excite electronic word-of-mouth. Benefits of social media campaigns are not limited to commercial marketing, and social marketers are also investing in such campaigns to tackle sensitive issues and difficult lifestyle changes. Offering incentives and using different message appeals are common promotional tactics, yet little is known about how these come together to influence consumer engagement and message diffusion. This paper is based on data from two rounds of experiments on Facebook with 293 student subjects, manipulating four incentive (monetary, non-monetary, social recognition and none) and 2 message appeal (fear versus informative) conditions. Findings suggest thatthe monetary incentive condition encourages the greatest level of total engagement. Our study also indicates that the fear appeal condition generates a higher level of engagement regardless of incentive condition. Repeated measures ANOVA, comparing incentives as a between subjects factor, shows an insignificant main effect for incentives but a significant main effect for message appeal. This study provides some evidence for the importance of social media in engaging consumers in discussing and disseminating social marketing messages. Additional research is needed to overcome study limitations of sample size and engagement length.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationInternational Social Marketing Conference 2016: Societal Wellbeing
Subtitle of host publicationConference Proceedings
Place of PublicationWollongong
PublisherUniversity of Wollongong
Pages186
Number of pages1
ISBN (Print)9781741282658
Publication statusPublished - 2016

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