The impact of social media content marketing posts on firm performance through consumer engagement

The aim of this study is to investigate whether the content message types and post formats that firms share on Facebook and Twitter accounts within the scope of content marketing make a difference on consumer engagement and to investigate the effect of consumer engagement on firm performance. In this context, the contents shared on Facebook and Twitter in 2019 by four companies in the health and technology sector in the Global Fortune 500 list were examined. Data were analyzed using a one-way analysis of variance and linear regression. The findings show that consumer engagement differs according to the types of messages that companies share on Facebook and Twitter. It has been determined that the content with emotional and mixed messages (emotional-informative) shared by the companies leads to more engagement than the content with informative messages. In addition, among the post formats, video content outperforms photo and link content in terms of engagement rate. Finally, it has been confirmed that the engagement rate of companies on social media does not affect company performance. The study contributes to the existing literature by examining the effects of content types (message type and post format) on consumer engagement and company performance in the field of content marketing, where limited research is available. In addition, it contributes to the literature in terms of examining the effects of these variables separately within the scope of the sector and social media platform and interpreting the similarities and differences.