Blending Brand Personality and Information: A Review of Content Strategies Driving Consumer Engagement in Social Media Advertising

Abstract

This review paper explores the intersection of advertising content design and consumer engagement within the context of social media, grounded in the empirical findings of Lee, Hosanagar, and Nair (2018). Their study, “Advertising Content and Consumer Engagement on Social Media: Evidence from Facebook,” represents a foundational advancement in understanding how various content types—particularly those reflecting brand personality and directly informative attributes—influence user interactions such as Likes, comments, shares, and click-throughs.Drawing on a dataset of over 106,000 Facebook messages posted by 782 companies, Lee et al. employ a novel methodology combining Amazon Mechanical Turk tagging and natural language processing (NLP) to classify advertising messages into brand personality-related and directly informative categories. Their findings underscore the nuanced trade-offs between these content types in eliciting different forms of engagement. Notably, while brand personality content (e.g., humor, emotion, philanthropy) generally drives higher user engagement in the form of Likes and shares, directly informative content (e.g., pricing, product availability) shows a mixed impact—depressing engagement when used alone but boosting it when combined with brand personality attributes. Furthermore, informative content tends to increase click-throughs, a proxy for conversion.A key contribution of the paper lies in its robust empirical methodology. It accounts for algorithmic bias induced by Facebook’s EdgeRank (News Feed) algorithm, which selectively delivers content based on user relevance. This selection mechanism is corrected using a semiparametric model of impression assignment, thereby isolating the causal impact of content characteristics on user engagement outcomes.This review critically examines the implications of these findings within the broader literature on content marketing, persuasion, and digital advertising. It situates the study in relation to theories of advertising as information (Nelson, 1974; Resnik & Stern, 1977), advertising as persuasion (Aaker, 1997; Keller, 1993), and more recent work on emotional contagion and viral content (Berger & Milkman, 2012). Moreover, this paper expands the discussion to practical implications for content engineering—encouraging marketers to adopt hybrid strategies that blend emotional resonance with product-driven clarity to optimize both brand equity and conversion.Despite its strengths, the original study has limitations. It does not directly link engagement metrics to sales outcomes, leaving the full impact on firm performance an open question. Additionally, the classification of content types—though systematic—is ultimately reliant on subjective tagging and cannot capture the full creative spectrum of social media advertising. Future research could build on these foundations by incorporating longitudinal data, cross-platform comparisons, and deeper behavioral tracking to establish causality between content strategies, engagement, and firm-level outcomes.Overall, Lee et al.’s work contributes significantly to our understanding of how firms can effectively engineer content to foster meaningful consumer interactions on social media. As digital advertising continues to evolve, insights from this research will remain central to developing effective and responsive marketing strategies.

Keywords: Social media advertising, consumer engagement, brand personality, content engineering, Facebook, digital marketing