EXPLORING HOW BRAND-GENERATED CONTENT CREDIBILITY AND TYPE SHAPE CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT ON SOCIAL MEDIA: EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE FROM TWITTER

Abstract

The thesis explores the phenomenon of brand-generated content on social media, explaining how its credibility and type shape customer engagement. The study examines how the source credibility (content generated independently by the brand versus content generated by brands in collaboration with celebrities), content type (informative, social, and entertaining), and content format (videos, links, photos and text) shape customer engagement on Twitter. This study adopted a qualitative and quantitative thematic content analysis methodology for analyzing 5086 tweets collected from Twitter using R and analyzed with the assistance of QSR NVivo 12 software. The findings suggest that when brands associate with celebrities in generating social media content, the generated content can attract higher user engagement and enable users to perceive it as more social and entertaining. Further, the findings suggest that associating with celebrities could negatively or positively affect brand credibility, depending on celebrities' actions and how users perceive the communicated content.