Abstract

The interactive nature of social media provides marketers with better opportunities to have direct conversations with consumers. It thus calls for more strategic management of consumer-brand relationship on social media. The current study focuses on personified brand characters’ Twitter accounts and its use in consumer-brand relationship. A content analysis was conducted to explore how the personified brand characters within two industries (insurance and food) maintained their relationships with consumers on Twitter. Five relationship maintenance strategies (positivity, openness, sharing tasks, social networking and assurance) and three message types (informational, socio-emotional, and instrumental) were examined. Results revealed that positivity and openness were adopted by most analyzed brand characters. Informational tweets were used the most, followed by socio-emotional tweets. The insurance industry adopted a higher portion of strategies of openness and sharing tasks as well as informational tweets; while the food industry adopted a higher portion of social networking strategy and socio-emotional tweets. In addition, positivity and assurance were positively correlated to socio-emotional tweets; while openness and social networking were positively correlated to informational tweets.

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