How Facebook Likes Affect Offline Consumer Behavior?
Marketers and social media managers should go ahead and trigger promotional communications on Facebook pages owned by their companies. This new paradigm can impact offline consumer behavior and leverage the engagement level of customers who are not connected with a brand. These are the primary contributions of a paper named What Are Likes Worth? A Facebook Page Field Experiment authored by Daniel Mochon, Karen Johnson, Janet Schwartz, and Dan Ariely and published in 2017 in the Journal of Marketing Research.
Firms struggle to measure the impact of Facebook in their marketing mix strategy. Companies are not aware of the value of connecting and interacting with customers through one of most successful social media channels, Facebook. However, the same firms spend vast amounts of money on social media, and it has a significant impact on their budget. Companies can command what they post but barely know how it propagates throughout a platform they do not own. For instance, because of the changes in the Facebook algorithm, content that shows up organically on users’ news feed started to be filtered.
An incentive-based health and wellness program named Discovery Vitality, a subsidiary of Discovery Health, a giant private health insurer in South Africa, facilitated its customers’ database and Facebook account to carry out this study.
All new customers who had joined the Vitality program between January 1, 2013, and June 30, 2013, and who had an active email address received an invitation in their inboxes to participate in the study. Researchers focused on new Vitality customers only — they had a low likelihood of have liked the page in the past.
The recent paper on Journal of Marketing Research present helpful insights for social media and marketing managers:
1- Companies should be proactive and prompt promotion communications
The act of liking the page, joining the Vitality community, and being able to participate in the so-called online word-of-mouth discussion seemed not to affect offline behavior — one of the outcomes of the study. On the one hand, they stated that Facebook was most effective when Vitality paid to reach — and to some extent to interrupt — customers with firm-relevant information. On the other hand, researchers did not find a direct effect of page likes when the Facebook page acted as a channel for social interaction set off by the customers only.
2- Facebook pages are most effective for customers with low-involvement
Facebook posts are usually targeted at a broad audience which does not add any value to highly involved customers that due to their nature were likely exposed to this general brand information. In practical terms and applied to the Vitality program, the general information provided by the Facebook page created awareness of some of the Vitality program peculiarities that less active customers were unlikely to know about. Also, the more cluttered news feed characteristic of heavy Facebook users might have also impacted why they ignored content than less active users. It may also suggest that it could have impeded the effect of likes, even when a company goes ahead and pays to boost posts.
3- Acquired likes can positively affect offline customer behavior
One of the most exciting outcomes that came out of the study is that users may be willing to like a company’s Facebook page if they are prompted to do so. It is a significant contribution to marketing managers as it shows the relative ease of acquiring likes.
Another exciting enrichment of the experiment is that in the case of the Vitality program, users were more prone to accept the invitation to like the Facebook page when the message focused more on the program rewards rather than on health benefits. It is then crucial to emphasize the need of companies to put in practice A/B testing to ascertain or increase their customers’ inclination to like a Facebook page.
This story is based on a paper published in the Journal of Marketing Research.
Authors of this story: Camila Bento, Catarina Pitta, Catarina Espírito Santo, Daniel Pinto Lopes, and Joana Gonçalves — NOVA Information Management School.
