Branding with social media: User gratifications, usage patterns, and brand message content strategies

The emergence of social media provides a new platform for developing brand-consumer relationships. The aim of the current study is to examine the differences in Chinese users' gratifications of different social media and the impact of brand content strategies on the quality of brand-consumer communication via social media. In the first study, 209 SNS and 161 microblog users were surveyed. Five dimensions of social media gratifications emerged from the factor analysis. Significant differences in the strengths of gratifications were found between SNS and microblog users. Usage patterns of SNS and microblog are analyzed and compared. In the second study, we examined the impact of users' gratification and the type of social media on the effectiveness of different brand content strategies through a two-week experiment involving 60 SNS users and 61 microblog users. Implications for developing branding strategies on different social media platforms are discussed.