Exploring firms’ fan page behavior and users’ participation: evidence from airline industry on Twitter

Firms motivate users to enhance their fan page engagement. Existing research has thus far concentrated on firms’ fan page management strategies which lead to different results in terms of numbers of followers and followings and the rate of users’ participation. Drawing on the insights of Social Practice Theory and Uses and Gratification Theory (UGT), we aim to examine firms’ strategies in relation to users’ activities on fan pages, and the methods firms utilize for content management of their fan pages. Our empirical study consisted of a sample of 36 prominent airlines in the world. We applied an exploratory mixed method to analyze the data obtained from a set of 153,992 postings (including tweets, retweets, and replies) which were published on the airlines’ fan pages. Our results showed that firms’ behavior from two perspectives of fan page strategy and content management has a significant relationship with users’ participation.