Best Practices of Social Media Use and Interactivity by Automotive Companies
Open Access
- Author:
- Sexton, Cheyenne Nicole
- Area of Honors:
- Advertising/Public Relations
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Arts
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Denise Sevick Bortree, Thesis Supervisor
Dr. Susan Mary Strohm, Thesis Honors Advisor
Dr. Susan Mary Strohm, Faculty Reader - Keywords:
- Social Media
Interactivity
Automotive
Facebook
Content Analysis - Abstract:
- Historically, automotive companies have been labeled as “lagging” in terms of acceptance to social media. Despite the multiple studies performed defining the benefits of social media for all aspects of an organization, some are still not aware of how to use it effectively to achieve positive results. Facebook, being the largest social networking website, is a playing ground for brands to flourish, allowing content creation to spark customer-brand interaction. This study examined the top six largest automotive companies use of Facebook to determine what was being posted, how much users were interacting with the content and if certain attributes would cause an automotive company to perform better. Since communication occurs with interaction in mind, it was vital to see if the automotive companies communication efforts were resulting in high interactivity rates. A content analysis of 400 posts from the six automotive companies found that most automotive companies on Facebook are not using the post types that garner the highest percentages of likes, comments and shares, but are using the post focuses that do. This study found that only three characteristics are positive and negative indicators to the percentage of interactivity. There was no statistical significance found between the automotive companies that received a greater percentage of likes, comments and shares to Facebook posts and their percent of growth of “Likes” to the overall Facebook Fan page throughout the time span of this study.