Does Hedonic Content of Brand Posts Affect Consumer Sociability Behaviour on Facebook?

Brand posts play a major role in engaging and maintaining social relationships with their consumers on Facebook company pages. Indeed, brand posts include many types of content and possess diverse types of media (e.g. text, photo, and video). Existing literature suggests there are some attempts to broadly categorise characteristics of brand posts, but still lack empirical studies about a brand post from the consumer perspective. This paper aims to examine how the hedonic and utilitarian style of brand posts influence consumer sociability behaviour on Facebook brand pages. A linear regression was employed to empirically test the model using data collected from Lithuanian users of Facebook (n = 320). The study provides new insights into the relations between the hedonistic and utilitarian style of brand posts and consumer sociability behaviour on brands' Facebook pages. The results reveal that hedonic content of brand posts leads to consumer sociability behaviour regarding liking while utilitarian content leads to consumer linking and commenting behaviour. However, differences in consumer social responses exist along with various types of brand content. The findings suggested a new way to study the classification of brand posts and to provide new implications for practitioners and researchers.