Hi, Agostino:

As we know, companies’ escalating investment in social media—in particular, in Facebook—has become reality. Most firms still do not see social networks as a vehicle for cultivating and winning customer loyalty, but rather as a resource for creating brand awareness.Although many managers recognize that Facebook Fans represent a marketing opportunity, there has been little research into the nature of different Fan types! Please take a look at the following recent research studies:

1.This study Wallace, Buil, Chernatory, & Hongan(2014) explored a typology of Fans, drawn from a sample of 438 individuals who "Like" brands on Facebook. Fans' brand loyalty, brand love, use of self-expressive brands, and word of mouth (WOM) for Liked brands were used to suggest four Fan types: the "Fan"- atic, the Utilitarian, the Self-Expressive, and the Authentic. The authors argued that the results of this exploratory study highlight the value of cluster analysis as a strategy for identifying different Fan types and provide insights to prompt further research into Facebook Fan types!

2. In another study (Gabmoa & Goncalves (2014) discovered that Facebook enhances the relations that increase loyalty via trust, customer satisfaction, perceived value, and commitment. And these relations are stronger for fans of the brand than for non-fans, and suggest that customer satisfaction is the strongest determinant of loyalty.!

• WALLACE, E., BUIL, I., de CHERNATONY, L., & HOGAN, M. (2014). Who "Likes" You … and Why? A Typology of Facebook Fans. Journal Of Advertising Research, 54(1), 92-109.
• Gamboa, A. M., & Gonçalves, H. M. (2014). Customer loyalty through social networks: Lessons from Zara on Facebook. Business Horizons, 57(6), 709-717

Hope this helps!

Nadeem

Thank you very much, Adel. Very interesting article and very useful framework. Some fresh new ideas in classyfing user-generated Facebook content. Yet, I am not fully convinced that this typology can be applied to company-controlled content, i.e. posts/activities generated by companies to raise customer engagement.

Specifically, the first two categories could be adapted to describe company-generated content but I have some doubt on the third one (contemplative content ).

If I understand well, it generally refers to customers’ posts/comments on Facebook such as complaints, questions, suggestions, evaluations, praises,... Maybe  this type can be tranformed in another type, focusing on the fact that these are more generally relationship-based activities, involving not only the "sender" (customer or company). 

Hi Melinda, thank you very much for your response.

I certainly will follow your suggestion to examine separately posts about media type and content type. As for "content type" category, I am now thinking that it can be further divided in three (or more) types, e.g. "content topic" (CSR, marketing, etc.... your article could be a good start, but I feel that this partly depends from industry-related features), "content value" (functional/informative, hedonic/entertainment) and a third one focussing on “content approach/orientation (transactional/commercial vs non-transactional)

p.s. I add a couple of publications that I take into consideration when I started this discussion for anyone interested in.

Article How to Transform Consumers into Fans of Your Brand

Article Popularity of Brand Posts on Brand Fan Pages: An Investigati...

Article Online engagement factors on Facebook brand pages

Data Factors influencing popularity of branded content in Faceboo...

Dear Agostino, Pletikosa uses a similar classification in the work you already indicated:

Pletikosa Cvijikj, I., & Michahelles, F. (2013) Online engagement factors on Facebook

brand pages. Social Network Analysis and Mining 3, 843–861. doi:10.1007/s13278-

013-0098-8.

She use this classification based no "Content type: In order to assign the content type categories  to the posts created by page moderators, we performed manual coding, following the coding development strategy (Glaser and Strauss 1967)."

About separate content type and media type, as you could see in our work the richness of the content matters. But I would classify both types of content also acording to the other cathegories you propose.

Factors influencing popularity of branded content in Facebook fan pages

Ferran Garriga Sabate, Jasmina Berbegal Mirabent, Antonio Cañabate Carmona, Philipp R. Lebherz

Dear Agostino,

i would recommend you to check out the article "What makes online content viral?" by Berger Jonah & Milkman Katherine L. a really educational article on what makes articles in "the new york times" viral with results promising for other types of information on the internet as well.

Berger J. & Milkman K.L. (2011), "What makes online content viral?" journal of marketing research

Dear Georgios, thank you. I knew the work of Berger and Milkman in JMR. They considered other soft criterion (i.e. emotions) for classyfing content. But I feel that is more complex for short messages (e.g. Facebook posts) to have a good coding development strategy (protocol) that determine whether or not content raise physiological arousal. 

@ Antonio. Many thanks. I definitely agree with you. Richness of the content matters, as you well explained in your article. Have you further developed your model? I have some complete data (FB Insights) related to travel industry (one big player and a small agency) and I would like to test some different models.

try this---- new edition out this year is better- 

This presentation is posted on SlideShare as well as the link here on Research Gate. See slides 10 - 15 for various ways of classifying content.

Data Creating A Content Marketing Strategy

This would be of interest for anyone interested in this question

Working Paper A Framework for Categorizing Social Media Posts

Tafesse, W., & Wien, A. (2017). A framework for categorizing social media posts. Cogent Business & Management, 4(1), 1284390.