Instagram marketing : a study about the effect of visual content on customer engagement in the airline industry

Abstract

Companies are consistently trying to attract the attention of consumers in different ways and social media can be used as a tool for achieving this. Great engagement on social media is important since it tends to create loyal customers and loyal customers may lead to an increased revenue for companies. In order to achieve engagement on social media the content has to be right, but knowing what kind of content to post on social media in order to achieve this can be difficult. Earlier research has shown that pictures on social media creates more engagement than plaint text, but little research has been done on what kind of pictures. Therefore, this thesis is focused on the effect of visual content on engagement rate in Instagram in the airline industry. This thesis includes three studies that were done to get a better understanding on what kind of visual content companies should use in order to achieve a higher engagement rate on their Instagram posts. The three studies show that visual content has an influence on the engagement rate on Instagram. Posts with pictures of an animal reach higher engagement rates than pictures without animals. A reason for this may be that animals often are seen as family, and create emotions. The findings in this thesis also show that pictures including people achieve longer viewing times than pictures without people. This thesis offers two contributions. First, it provides insight in how visual content influences engagement rate and viewing time in Instagram posts. Second, it gives a foundation on how future studies in this field could be conducted.Keywords: social media, Instagram, visual content, customer engagement