Two Essays on Brand Marketing Communication on Social Media Restricted; Files Only

Abstract

We have witnessed the explosive growth of social media, which has become a part of everyday life for many. It is not surprising that social media has transformed communication practices for firms, emerging as a key component of marketing strategies. While the importance of social media platforms in marketing has been widely recognized in practice, understanding brand communications on social media and their impact on user behavior is still at a nascent stage. This is primarily due to the challenges inherent in the nature of content on social media platforms. This dissertation seeks to address these challenges, by employing state-of-the-art machine learning techniques, and to enhance user engagement on social media. The first essay measures brand personality traits expressed in the textual marketing communications of brands on Twitter and investigates the impact of these traits on user engagement and its dynamics. It further offers implications for brands' social media post scheduling. The second essay provides a framework that accounts for the multimodality of social media content, predicting user engagement with social media posts of brands on Instagram. The essay demonstrates the practical value of the framework by providing applications that assist in brand content generation.

Table of Contents

I.           OVERVIEW--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1

II.           ESSAY 1: THE IMPACT OF EXPRESSING PERSONALITY IN SOCIAL MEDIA POSTS ON USER ENGAGEMENT------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 4

1.      Introduction------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 4

2.      Literature----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 8

3.      Data----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 13

4.      Measuring Personality Traits Expressed in Text------------------------------------------ 14

5.      Impact of Personality Traits on User Engagement--------------------------------------- 20

6.      Dynamics of Personality Impact: Three Representative Scenarios ------------------- 30

7.      Post Scheduling Considering Dynamic Impact of Personality Traits ----------------- 36

8.      Discussion--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 40

III.           ESSAY 2: INFORMING BRANDED SOCIAL MEDIA CONTENT WITH MULTIMODAL REPRESENTATION LEARNING----------------------------------------------------------------- 42

1.      Introduction------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 42

2.      Literature----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 46

3.      A Multimodal Framework to Predict Social Media Engagement---------------------- 52

4.      Data----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 59

5.      Empirical Results------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 60

6.      Informing Branded Content for Airline Industry----------------------------------------- 67

7.      Applications: Content Modification Using Generative AI ------------------------------ 75

8.      Discussion--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 81

About this Dissertation

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School	Laney Graduate School
Department	Business
Subfield / Discipline	Marketing
Degree	Ph.D.
Submission	Dissertation
Language	English
Research Field	Business Administration, Marketing
Keyword	Machine Learning Social Media Unstructured Data
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	David A. Schweidel, Emory University
Committee Members	Kunpeng Zhang, University of Maryland Panagiotis Adamopoulos, Emory University Inyoung Chae, Emory University

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