How Brands Can Boost their Fan Pages’ Overall Sharing: The ‘Right’ Variation of Fit between Online Contents and Brand Fan Pages

Every day, brands post an average of 1.5 posts on Facebook posts to their fans, in the hope that people will share these contents with others. Nonetheless, 87% of posts to brand Facebook pages go unanswered (DMR stats 2015). To reduce this negative outcome and attract fans’ attention often companies post contents on their corporate pages that are not “congruent” with their brand. The question is whether this strategy is effective and how brands can design social media campaigns to boost customers’ sharing activity. In this paper, we focus on the degree of congruency (fit) between the post and the brand fan page and we examine whether and how the degree of post’ perceived fit and its variability across posts affect sharing activity. We empirically explore these questions using data about 5090 posts from 6 Facebook brand’s fan pages. Our results document the existence and nature of a relationship between fit, fit’s variability and social media users’ engagement.