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The use social media platforms (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn) as powerful marketing communication tool has surged in the last few years. Firms are depending heavily on such platforms, in particular, social media-based brand communities such as Facebook brand’s page having more than 50 million registered business (Dwivedi et al., 2020). According to recent studies, 4.14 billion people are active social media users (Statista, 2020), correspondingly, 90% of companies utilise social media to market their businesses, and increase their investments to reach $48 by the end of year 2021 (Guttmann, 2018). Social media offer brand managers new opportunities to reach customers, build long-lasting relationships and take advantage of customer engagement (Roma & Aloini, 2019). The management of brand communities lies at the top of marketers and brand managers priorities; they still find it challenging to leverage customer engagement with the two types of brand-related content generated either by the firm or the user (Colicev et al., 2019; Moran et al., 2019).
In the marketing literature, user-generated content differs from marketer-generated content. Marketer-generated content (MGC) is defined as brand communication created by marketers and shared in brand pages on social media channels including informative, emotional or commercial content in different forms such as text, photos, videos, product information, sales promotion, or sweepstakes (Colicev et al., 2019; Meire et al., 2019; Moran et al., 2019). While, firm-generated content (FGC) refers to the brand-related content created by users outside the professional routines and practices that reflects the “wisdom of the crowd” (Roma & Aloini, 2019). The dynamic interactive nature of social media empowers customers as co-creators and gives them access to very different types of communities. The central role played by customers in online brand communities increases its complexity (Kohli, et al, 2015). Other differences between UGC and MGC exist in terms of volume, valence and content (Lee et al., 2011; Lee et al., 2019; Yang et al., 2019).
Most research has focused on understanding content characteristics (Akpinar & Berger, 2017; de Vries et al., 2012), user behaviour (Halliday, 2016), and the context where such content is created (Berger & Schwartz, 2011). Moreover, the effects of UGC and MGC shared via social media on consumer decision making such as purchase decision (Goh et al., 2013; Kumar et al., 2016), intention (Malthouse et al., 2016; Mayrhofer et al., 2020), eWOM (Poulis et al., 2019), product development and adoption (Ho-Dac, 2020) and customer attitudes and behaviours for example customer trust and customer-company identification (Badenes-Rocha et al., 2019), customer-based brand equity (Bashir et al., 2017; Rachna, 2017) have been examined in previous studies. However, without customer engagement, the value of brand-related content on social media is undermined (Moran et al., 2019). The effectiveness of each type on customer response has been discussed and stated that UGC increases behavioural intentions (e.g., Islam & Rahman, 2017; Malthouse et al., 2016; Schivinski & Dabrowski, 2016). It may be easy to establish brand pages on any of the social media channels and attract members to these communities, but many of them have poor performance with respect to fostering customer engagement (Liu et al., 2019).