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A Social Media Marketing Typology: Classifying Brand Facebook Page Messages For Strategic Consumer Engagement

Growing attention for Social Media marketing has resulted in a burgeoning field of research and practice; yet, hitherto few studies have provided empirically grounded and comprehensive typologies for assessing, classifying, and in turn, informing the future development of Social Media marketing communications. The lack of such comprehensive and valuable typologies appears to be related to (i) the limited applicability of traditional marketing theories in the context of novel Social Media; (ii) the focus of existing studies on a limited brand category or messaging category; (iii) the plethora of Social Media platforms that complicate the development of contextually relevant messaging strategies. To overcome this void in the literature and these three challenges, this study presents the results of a longitudinal Multi-Grounded Theory study of three Fortune 110 companies—Delta Airlines, WalMart, and McDonald’s—of six weeks of Facebook Page messaging data (n=256 brand posts). The proposed typology encompasses seven overarching message categories—namely Brand Awareness, Corporate Social Responsibility, Costumer Service, Engagement, Product Awareness, Promotional, and Seasonal—with a total of 23 sub-categories. This typology provides a valuable theoretical and empirical starting point for framing Social Media marketing strategies, and for informing the design and development of successful Social Media marketing messages.