Organization’s Brand Performance in Social Networking: Effects of Dynamics and Synergies Coming from the Integrated Marketing Communications

Abstract

Publicity, sales promotions and advertising are among the most frequent marketing communication activities to an organizational brand become recognized in the market. But their effectiveness on brand performance in social networking involves longitudinal analyzes due to oscillations in metrics and comprises also the need of several matched communication activities due to the multiple issues about the organization that provoke interest in users. This study investigates the dynamics and synergies of marketing communications on the performance of an organizational brand in social networking. We collected data of communication activities and organizational brand performance metrics in the social media Facebook during 424 days. The study proposed three dimensions of performance in social networking as dependent variables and four dimensions of communication activities implemented by the organization as explanatory variables. The results of dynamic regressions showed that the activity of impersonal communication had greater effect on the dimensions of “consumption and participation within the organization’s fan page”, “popularity and encouragement to the electronic word of mouth of organization’s posts” and “the reach and views of the organization’s posts”. In addition, the more synergistic is the implementation of the communication activities, the higher the performance in each dimension, mainly in the reach of the posts and views. The findings show that social media managers must use simultaneous communication actions, especially event publicity, sales promotions and institutional advertising to enhance the performance of the organizational brand in social networking.