Corporate facebook posts in the UK & Greece: A content analysis

Abstract

Despite the proliferation of research on the value of Facebook as a marketing tool, there is limited understanding on how companies use Facebook to interact with consumers. At the same time, very little is known about consumers' response to corporate Facebook posts. The present study adopts a cross-cultural approach and investigates (a) the differences in the content of corporate Facebook posts between the UK and Greece with respect to the use of informational and emotional content, and (b) consumers' response to these posts. A content analysis of 2000 corporate Facebook posts reveals that message content is country specific. UK corporate Facebook posts focus on informational content, whereas Greek corporate Facebook posts emphasise emotional content. Our results also reveal differences in the behaviour of Facebook users in the two countries. In the UK, corporate Facebook posts with informational content collect more 'Likes' compared to posts with non-informational content, whereas corporate Facebook posts with emotional content attain more 'Likes' than non-emotional posts in Greece.