Purpose: This paper aims to uncover the drivers of consumer-brand engagement on Facebook, understood here as users’ behavioral responses in the form of clicks, likes, shares and comments. We highlight which content components, interactivity cues (calls to action [CTA]) and media richness (e.g. video, photo and text) are most effective at inducing consumers to exhibit clicking, liking, commenting and sharing behaviors toward branded content. Design/methodology/approach: This study analyzes 757 Facebook-based brand posts from a media and entertainment brand over a 15-week period. It investigates the relationship between interactive cues and media richness with consumer engagement using a negative binomial model. Findings: Results show positive relationships for both interactivity cues and media richness content components on increasing consumer-brand engagement outcomes. The findings add clarity to previous inconsistent findings in the marketing literature. CTAs enhance all four engagement behaviors. Media richness also strongly influences all engagement behaviors, with visual imagery (photos and videos) attracting the most consumer responses. Research limitations/implications: The sampled posts pertain to one brand (a radio station) and are thus concentrated within the media/entertainment industry, which limits the generalizability of findings. In addition, the authors limit their focus to Facebook but recognize that findings may differ across more visual or textual social networking sites. Practical implications: The authors uncover the most effective pairings of media richness and interactivity components to trigger marketer-desired, behavioral responses. For sharing, for example, the authors show that photo-based posts are more effective on average than video-based posts. The authors also show that including an interactive call to act to encourage one type of engagement behavior has a near-universal effect in increasing all engagement behaviors. Originality/value: This study takes two widely used concepts within the communications and advertising literatures – interactivity cues and media richness – and tests their relationship with engagement using real and actual users’ data available via Facebook Insights. This method is more robust than surveys or wall scrapping, as it mitigates Facebook’s algorithm effect. The results produce more consistent relationships than previous content marketing studies to date.

Customers are influenced not only by how much they trust a company and its representatives but also by how much they trust the broader context in which the market exchange is taking place. In this article, the authors test two rival sociological perspectives regarding the influence of customer trust in the broader context. One perspective proposes that trust in the context replaces trust in individual firms and their representatives. This view suggests that firm/representative trust is not always critical, especially for customers with high trust in the context. An alternative perspective is that trust in the context fosters and legitimates trust in firms and their representatives. This view implies that firm/representative trust is a necessary mediator of the influence of trust in the context. The authors test predictions based on both perspectives, using empirical results from two studies implemented in two countries. The results from both studies support the proposition that trust in firms and their representatives is a necessary mediator of trust in the broader context.