Beyond likes and tweets: Consumer engagement behavior and movie box office in social media

•Online consumer engagement behavior (CEB) affects future economic performance.•CEB on Facebook and YouTube positively correlate with movie box-office revenue.•Social media-based CEB is critical to improve economic performance of movie firms.

This study examines the effects of social media, from the perspective of consumer engagement behavior (CEB), to investigate how CEB is associated with economic performance. Based on social media activities surrounding US movies, we used ordinary least square (OLS) regression models and found that CEB on Facebook and YouTube positively correlate with box-office gross revenue; however, the same effect was not observed on Twitter. This study proposed and tested a set of metrics for CEB on social media, and also provided empirical support for associating CEB with economic performance. The results underscore the importance of investing in social media communication across multiple channels.