How brand-stakeholder dialogue drives brand-hosted community engagement on social media: A mixed-methods approach

The literature has revealed various antecedents of consumers' participation in an online brand community. But it is still unknown how digital brand-stakeholder dialogue (BSD), a type of communicative interaction on social media, impacts online brand community engagement (OBCE) such as likes, shares, and comments. This study unpacked how BSD affected OBCE on Facebook by revealing the underlying behavioral mechanisms and boundary conditions. Using mixed methods to analyze large-scale Facebook data (N = 75,969), we identified both direct and indirect effects of BSD on OBCE, and the indirect effects were through reciprocal communication, replacement (a community member's response to other members' brand-related questions), and sentiment. We also found that high-BSD brands' posts of higher modality received more positive sentiments. High-BSD brands' posts about products had higher reciprocity. Our findings provide important implications regarding how to maximize the positive effects of dialogue in a social-mediated brand community.