Platform or Content Strategy? Exploring Engagement With Brand Posts on Different Social Media Platforms

Promoting engagement with brand posts tends to be important for brands and marketers who aim for success in social media marketing. With the variety of social media available today, it can be difficult for brand and marketing practitioners, especially small brands, to coordinate their efforts across different platforms. This study examines platform and content strategies in terms of engagement with brand posts through data mining and one-way ANOVA. The results suggest that for each brand, engagement with brand posts can be improved by choosing an appropriate platform strategy, instead of using a different content strategy across platforms. These findings contribute to a limited analysis of platform strategies for social media marketing engagement of today’s brands. Plain Language Summary Exploring Different Platforms and Content Engagement on Social Media Today, it’s important to increase social media engagement. The variety of social media available makes it difficult to coordinate efforts across different platforms. This study examines platform and content strategies in terms of engagement on 9330 posts. The results suggest that engaging platforms, such as TikTok, can increase engagement more than using different content strategies across platforms.


Introduction
A brand needs to promote its engagement with customers offline and online, as it must seek to achieve visibility and recognition in cluttered marketplaces (Borges-Tiago et al., 2023).Previous studies have revealed that brand engagement with customers significantly affects brand perception, willingness to share and purchase intention (Graham & Wilder, 2020;Ibrahim, 2022).When examining the determinants that facilitate customer engagement with brands, many scholars have addressed the importance of content strategy (Hollebeek & Macky, 2019;Taiminen, 2019).Among them, the analysis of brands' platform strategies for interacting with customers on social media is under-researched.However, this is necessary for further investigation, as the revolution in social media platforms is seen as shaping the current business system for brand engagement with customers (Peruchi et al., 2022;Wang, 2023).
Prior research has further shown that with the rapid growth of social media, its broad diversity makes it difficult for brands and marketers to focus on all platforms (Gawer, 2022).A new Pew Research Center survey on social media use finds that TikTok has become one of the top online platforms for U.S. teens, while the percentage of teens using Facebook has declined sharply and Instagram and Snapchat have grown (Vogels et al., 2022).Scholars have argued that previous research on analyzing platform variation in marketing engagement has been limited to a single social media platform rather than multiple platforms, and that the relationship between the choice of social media platform and predicting brand and customer engagement has not been adequately studied (Shen, 2023b).More importantly, existing research supports that social media platforms are determinants of customer engagement with brands (Unnava & Aravindakshan, 2021).
As a result, this study responds to prior studies by further investigating engagement with brand posts on different social media platforms.It poses two research questions as below: (1) How engagement with brand posts varies by social media platform?(2) How to increase engagement with brand posts on different social media platforms?Accordingly, this study investigated 10 well-known brands, and collected their brand posts on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok.Subsequently, the data were analyzed and compared based on post content, platform, and corresponding engagement rates.Given this comparison, the findings help improve engagement with brands' posts on social media, as well as with those who are having trouble coordinating social media engagement across platforms.The importance of this study is that it complements the previous literature that has been restricted to smart content marketing and has given less consideration to the impact of platform revolution and different platform strategies on brand and customer interactivity.Its novelty lies in the data mining examination of both customer and brand engagement on three representatives of different platform types, and supports that choosing appropriate platform strategies is more effective in increasing customer engagement with brands across social media platforms than using different content strategies.

Drivers for Customer and Brand Engagement
Understanding customer and brand engagement is critical to the successful marketing of a brand (Lin & Wu 2023).It is a tangible process between the customer and the brand, which causes behavioral affinity (Hollebeek & Macky, 2019).The extant literature emphasizes its significance in marketing as it directly contributes to customer relationships and brand performance (Santini et al., 2020).As such, more and more researchers are concentrating on investigating the drivers affecting customer and brand engagement.The drivers discussed in the previous literature range from product and customer factors to brand and content factors (Algharabat et al., 2020;Onofrei et al., 2022).
Of these, most scholars have focused on content factors.These prior studies support that content strategies can be effective in increasing consumer traffic, and assisting brands in influencing consumer performance (Asnawati et al., 2022).Therefore, content strategies have acted as one of the top strategies for marketing over the years.In particular, with the popularity of social media, blog post marketing turns out to be a key channel for content strategies.Existing literature suggests that different blog content for brands can be applied on social media platforms to enhance brand engagement with customers (Pelletier et al., 2020).For this reason, brands and marketers struggle to stand out on social media using different content strategies, as brand blog content is perceived as replicating past templates of media communication messages (Shen, 2021).This is a result of the many social media platforms currently in use, which requires a great deal of effort on the part of brands and marketers, especially for smaller brands.
However, scholars argue that previous studies have not noticed that technological changes in media offer new opportunities for customer and brand engagement (Moura˜o & Brown, 2022).Recent research indicates a close connection between brand depiction and customer perceptions of the brand on social media (Husain et al., 2022).Scholars further argue that social media has a great impact on customer engagement with brands, which then goes on to affect brand trust and customer purchase intent (Upadhyay et al., 2022).While a growing body of research focuses on engagement on social media, present studies continue to suggest that prior studies have paid more attention to the motivation for using social media in customer and brand engagement rather than the importance of customer engagement with brands, and that social media platforms have been overlooked as determinants of customer and brand engagement (Theocharis et al., 2023;Wang, 2021).Hence, this study argues that social media platforms are determinants of customer and brand engagement, and that platform strategy is the primary strategy for brands and marketing practitioners to increase engagement with brand posts on social media.

Customer and Brand Engagement on Different Platforms
To address this research gap, several scholars have explored the relationship between engagement and platform on social media.For instance, Carlson et al. (2018) illustrate how Facebook's design features can induce customer value perceptions, including customer feedback and intention to collaborate.Among social media, Facebook is reported to be the first platform to surpass 1 billion registered accounts, and currently has more than 2.9 billion active users per month (Statista, 2023).Recently, scholars tend to care more about customer engagement with brands on Instagram, as it has overtaken Facebook and has had rapid customer growth (Hazzam, 2022).For example, Molina-Prados et al. (2022) analyzed customer and brand involvement, and find it to be a significant predictor of Instagram engagement.
Despite the above discussion in the literature, scholars have not achieved agreement on the impact of platform features on customer and brand engagement, especially regarding how different platforms can develop better interactions between customers and brands (Hamzah & Johari, 2023).For one thing, previous studies have dealt primarily with engagement on one popular platform, rather than investigating multiple platforms (Wang, 2023).In addition, the main platforms studied so far are Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram (Shen, 2023b).Vinerean and Opreana (2021) point out that future research on customer and brand engagement could be understood in terms of Instagram and other platforms, which can enhance brands' relationships with key audiences.Therefore, this study complements prior studies by further comparing the engagement of brand posts on Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok, allowing us to gain a broad understanding of social media platforms in terms of customer and brand engagement.
For another, current research is limited to considering the role of content type rather than content format (e.g., pictures and videos), and the link between the selection of social media platform (e.g., Facebook and Twitter) when examining customer engagement with a brand (Shahbaznezhad et al., 2021).Moreover, most of the early studies were conceptual or provided concepts of social media behavior (Santini et al., 2020).Furthermore, these studies have mainly applied survey methods (Molina-Prados et al., 2022).Unlike these studies, this study attempted to use data mining and ANOVA, which have rarely been used in previous studies.Recent studies suggest that research on social media can benefit from data mining as a new approach that can further contribute to a better understanding of engagement between customers and brands, and social media characterized by data (Kang & Lou, 2022;Verma & Yadav, 2021).

Data Collection
To collect the data, first, we checked the official top brand lists issued by Twitter (see https://marketing.twitter.com/en/success-stories/best-of-tweets-2021),TikTok (see https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/year-on-tiktok-2021-us),and Instagram (see https://about.instagram.com/blog/announcements/instagram-trends-2021).Then, we compared brand names on the lists, and chose the most influential brands on all three platforms.Finally, the selected brands are Dove, Ford, H&M, Zara, GoPro, Gucci, Nike, Starbucks, Burberry, and Disney for investigation in the study.In addition, we also collected their brand posts and corresponding engagement, including likes and comments.Previous studies have shown that engagement between customers and brands can be measured by variables such as likes and comments on brand posts (Agrawal & Mittal, 2022;Wahid & Gunarto, 2022).This is because a ''like'' can be understood as a customer agreeing with the content of a brand post and having a positive attitude toward it, while a ''comment'' can be thought of as a communication channel for interaction between a customer and a brand, as customers can express their opinions on the content of a brand post in a comment (Shen, 2023a).Thus, following the studies discussed above, we collected likes and comments on these brand posts to further analyze the engagement with brand posts.

Data Analysis and Coding Procedure
The process of data analysis was divided into two parts.
The first part was to analyze the engagement with brand posts in terms of content strategy.This part was performed in the Natural Language Toolkit with Python.Following the coding procedure of the official document (see www.nltk.org),we tokenized the content of brand posts, and then categorized them into different groups according to their frequency.Figure 1 illustrates how NLTK analyzed the data from the study.
After that, the engagement with brand posts was calculated based on their content groups.The second part was to analyze the engagement with brand posts in terms of platform strategy.Regarding engagement with brand posts, we followed previous studies (Shen, 2023a;Wies et al., 2023) by summing the total number of times customers liked and commented on a brand post, and then dividing by the number of followers of the brand to calculate.This part was done in one-way ANOVA with SPSS to compare the significant engagement differences between the three platforms.Figure 2 shows the research flow of this study.

Engagement With Brand Posts on Platforms
Consequently, we analyzed 9,330 brand posts from 10 brands, which on average had 19,347 likes on Twitter, 744,939 likes on Instagram, and 1,122,400 likes on TikTok, as well as 1,515 comments on Twitter, 6,981 comments on Instagram, and 12,581 comments on TikTok (see Table 1).The results show that TikTok has the most likes and comments from customers, while Twitter has the fewest likes and comments in general.In terms of brand followers, they range from 184K (Dove) to 11,000K (Starbucks) on Twitter; from 793K (Dove) to 276,969K (Nike) on Instagram; and 85K (Dove) to 6,700K (Zara).The results show that Instagram has the most brand followers, but TikTok has the least brand followers.Hence, brand posts on TikTok have a higher rate than on Instagram and Twitter when it comes to overall engagement.
Separately, regarding engagement with brand posts on Twitter, Nike has the most likes (7,212) and comments   The results with the fewest number of likes and comments also prove that engagement with brand posts is higher on TikTok than on Instagram and Twitter.
To further support the above findings, the results were tested for statistical significance.Specifically, a oneway ANOVA and post hoc analysis were conducted on the data of engagement with brand posts across the three platforms (see Table 2).The analysis reveals that engagement with brand posts on the three platforms was statistically significant in terms of likes (F = 79.239,p \ .001)and comments (F = 28.239,p \ .001).Similarly, the analysis results confirm that engagement with brand posts is higher on TikTok than on Twitter and Instagram.

Classification of Brand Posts
From a content strategy perspective, as mentioned above, we have divided these brand posts into three groups according to their token frequency (See Figure 3).Specifically, the first group of brand posts contains a focus on brand announcements.The most frequently used tokens are ''collection,'' ''campaign,'' brand names and new product names, showing the latest brand news in the posts.Then, the second group of brand posts concentrates on brand image.The most frequently used tokens are ''comfort,'' ''delicious,'' ''best,'' and ''confidence,'' building a good and positive brand image in the posts.Finally, the third group of brand posts consists of emotional branding, including the most frequently used tokens such as ''love,'' ''fear,'' ''check,'' ''tell,'' and ''like.''This group of brand posts aim to stir up customer emotions in the posts and create a relationship between brands and their customers so that customers can interact with brands.Regarding their engagement with brand posts, the ANOVA analysis reveals statistically insignificant results for likes and comments, suggesting that content strategy is not a driver of engagement with brand posts across platforms.

Discussion
To summarize, this study analyzed customer engagement with 10 brands and their post content on the three platforms from the perspectives of platform and content strategies.For the first research question, ''How engagement with brand posts varies by social media platforms,'' the results highlight the statistical significance of how engagement with brand posts varies by platform.Specifically, engagement with brand posts is higher on TikTok than on Instagram and Twitter.TikTok's popularity in social media has skyrocketed, reportedly boasting over ''800 million active users worldwide,'' and is now a top social media platform (Savic, 2021;Vogels et al., 2022).TikTok is a video-uploading platform that enables the uploading of short videos, serving social networking and entertaining functions that, due to its nature, induce social and cultural impact (Yuan et al., 2022).
As an emerging phenomenon, practitioners and researchers are still unclear about how short-form video platforms engage users (Zhao & Wagner, 2022).Thus, this study further explains platforms with short video features can increase engagement between customers and brands.GoPro often uploads short videos on TikTok about how to use GoPro products in different situations, such as diving under the sea, skimboarding on the ocean, and skiing on snowy mountains.Compared to texts and photos, these short videos can better show GoPro how to record beautiful scenes of everyday life in time with their products.In general, these vivid short videos can have higher engagement between customers and brands with over millions of customer likes.In addition, engagement with brand posts in the form of short videos on Instagram and Twitter is also higher.For example, from time to time, Burberry uploads short videos of their fashion shows on Twitter ranging from 20 s to about 5 min.The engagement with these brand posts can typically have more than 3,000 likes and 2,700 comments, which is much higher than their average engagement level.
The high engagement of short videos between customers and brands across the three platforms suggests that brand-created short videos are more likely to be accepted by customers than longer videos.Existing literature suggests that customers tend to trust websites that are targeted to them and comment on products, brands, and posts when the website includes video testimonials instead of text or picture testimonials (Bigne et al., 2020).Namely, video can help improve engagement between customers and brands on social media due to the reliability of this format compared to texts and pictures.Besides, although the duration of short videos is less, they are informative, engaging, and simple to produce and spread quickly, allowing customers to quickly grasp the focus of brand purpose (Haenlein et al., 2020).Especially for the example of how to use GoPro cameras mentioned above, videos can explain better than texts or pictures, allowing customers to understand and engage with it, thus further increasing their interactions with brands.As such, the present study reveals that the outstanding quality of the platform can make a significant difference in the engagement of customers and brands on social media.
In terms of the second research question, ''How to increase engagement with brand posts on different social media platforms,'' the findings support the argument in the study that platform strategy rather than content strategy is a top strategy for increasing customer engagement with brand posts.The findings show that, as far as brands are concerned, there is no significant difference in engagement between customers and brands when the same brand posts different content on different platforms for the same brand campaign, while there is a significant difference in engagement between customers and brands when the same brand posts the same content on different platforms for this brand campaign.For example, Gucci talked about their new Gucci Marmont bags in the post.For the same content, the post has 257 likes and 30 shares on Twitter, 17,500 likes and 78 shares on Instagram, and 73,400 likes and 1,443 shares on TikTok.However, in terms of brands using brand content differentiation on platforms, GoPro for instance, showcases how good quality of its cameras on Instagram, but on TikTok it instructs customers on the use of its cameras.Here, brand content differentiation means a brand posts different content for the same brand information or campaigns on its different social media platforms.In other words, engagement with brand posts is not affected by brand content differentiation on platforms.In addition, the present study does not show a significant difference in engagement based on posts from the three groups of brand content.Again, this result reaffirms the above conclusion that engagement with brand posts on platforms turns out to be related to platform strategy.

Theoretical and Managerial Implications
Consequently, the present study has some implications for the current literature and practice.First, the present study extends the extant literature by arguing that platform strategy, rather than content strategy, is the primary strategy for increasing engagement between customers and brands.To be specific, previous studies have focused on analyzing the cause and effect of customer engagement on social media (Ibrahim, 2022;K. Y. Kim et al., 2021), instead of the relations between engagement with brand posts and social media platforms.As such, prior studies have not addressed much about the impact of platforms on brand post engagement (Hamzah & Johari, 2023).Furthermore, most of the current studies have primarily drawn on content strategies to increase customer-brand engagement (Hollebeek & Macky, 2019;Shen, 2023b).The findings of this study do not agree with the current literature that different blog content on platforms can improve engagement with brand posts (Asnawati et al., 2022), and that different platforms need contextual content because customer profiles differ across platforms and the same content is not efficient on different platforms (Lopes & Casais, 2022).Instead, this study advances previous studies showing significant differences in engagement between customers and brands when brands post the same content on different platforms.The inconsistent results suggest that platform strategy has a better effect on engagement with brand posts than content strategy.
Second, this study contributes to the existing literature by adding a comparison of engagement with brand posts on popular platforms, including TikTok, to understand social media marketing.Recent research has concentrated on one popular platform, for example, Facebook or Instagram (Pun & Fung, 2023;Vinerean & Opreana, 2021).As a new business ecosystem of engagement is forming as a consequence of the platform revolution, the existing research can benefit from a cross-platform comparison in this study for a comprehensive understanding of engagement between customers and brands on social media.Especially, this study extends the recent understanding of engagement with brand posts on TikTok, an increasingly popular platform.This study advances previous research (Dewi et al., 2023;Haenlein et al., 2020) showing that platforms with short-video features can increase engagement between customers and brands.The present study proves that TikTok has higher engagement with customers, but this significant difference is not caused by post content.This study further indicates the reason that accounts for it is platform nature.For instance, short videos are the nature of TikTok posts.Hence, the present study highlights that engagement with brand posts on platforms can be improved through the form of short videos.
Additionally, the present study advances the existing literature by exploring the application of data mining in understanding engagement with brand posts on social media.As mentioned earlier, the current research refers to the engagement between customers and brands considering customers, not the relationship between customers and brands.As a result, most of the current research uses survey methods to study customers and their involvement (Molina-Prados et al., 2022).In this case, this study investigated both customer and brand aspects.Specifically, from the brand's perspective, this study analyzed their content and platform strategy, as well as likes and comments from the customer's perspective, which provides a more comprehensive understanding of customer and brand engagement.In terms of methodology, this study applied data mining techniques instead of survey methods.Data mining is regarded as one of the best analytical methods for new knowledge discovery (Shu & Ye, 2023).Extant literature further suggests that data mining is ''a novel, general, reliable and flexible approach'' for monitoring and understanding social media data (Shen & de la Garza, 2019).Therefore, the success of the data mining application in this study complements prior studies, supports the application of data mining in engagement research on social media, and argues that it helps broaden the methodology of related research.
In practice, the findings of the present study suggest choosing an appropriate social media platform before using smart content marketing strategies for brands and marketers.With the rapid development of social media, it is possible to choose not only popular platforms that Shen are overwhelmed by the public, but also emerging platforms such as TikTok in this study and Metaverse.Since TikTok is evidenced to be a high-engagement platform for brands' interacting with customers, brands and marketers can consider applying TikTok to improve their engagement with customers.In the process of investigation, the present study notices that brands and marketers do not pay much attention to their TikTok accounts, and many well-known brands such as Costco even has not had an account.This is because other social media like Instagram has more followers.As a result, brands and marketers are willing to spend more effort on platforms with larger followers.However, the high engagement with brand posts on TikTok indicates that brands and marketers can move their efforts from Instagram to TikTok and other new platforms to improve their engagement with customers and attract new clients.Especially for small brands, it may be hard for them to take care of engagement across platforms due to a limited number of employees and financial support.For them, TikTok could be the first choice to focus their efforts, and practitioners can use the same post content on each platform to save time and effort.In addition, after choosing platform, brands and marketers can think of utilizing more short videos to present the content of their posts.In particular, if the brand content is difficult to express and understand with texts and pictures, using the short-video format is highly recommended, as it is effective for improving engagement between customers and brands on platforms.

Limitations and Directions for Further Research
Without a doubt, the present study has some restrictions that can enlighten scholars for further research.First, the present study analyzed engagement between customers and brands on Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok regarding different engagement with brand posts of platform and content strategy.The nature of the three platforms discussed here is different, which may also account for the different customer-brand engagement.Future research could consider further exploring different features of platforms on which customers engage with brands on social media.Second, the present study suggests that engagement with brand posts can be improved by selecting an appropriate platform for marketing and considering taking advantage of platform features.However, previous studies have mentioned other drivers such as customer characteristics for improving engagement between customers and brands.Therefore, it would be interesting to investigate the level of customer education on the impact of different platforms and content formats.

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.Example of data analysis.

Table 1 .
Results of Engagement on Platforms.

Table 2 .
Statistical Significance Test of the Results.
*The mean difference is significant at the 0.05 level.