Which Brands Are Best Suited to Social Media Advertising? A Field Study of Social Media Advertising Effects on Consumer Attitudes

This research focuses on identifying which brand-related characteristics affect social media advertising effectiveness. We use a novel dataset from a large-scale global field experiment covering 110 brands running 235 Facebook and Instagram advertising campaigns between October 2015 and May 2017, and augment it with brand-generated posts on Facebook. Using natural language processing, we analyze these posts to infer how “human-like” are the actions of different brands in the newsfeed environment. We find that social media advertising campaigns that behave in a more “human” manner are more likely to have significant impact on upper-funnel mindset metrics, such as brand saliency.