The results from this study provides further insight regarding the practice of food brands' use of Br-UGC on their social media to promote their products, services, and image. Leveraging, or borrowing, content from consumers is proving to be an up and coming trend for marketing on social media because it helps strengthen the relationships between brands and their customers. Overall, food brands prefer to share Br-UGC that provides more information about their brand. Additionally, they share content that overtly focuses on their branding, but they do not prioritize leveraging content that features people with happy facial expressions. It was also indicated that consumers do not express having envious feelings towards a brand's products or services in comment sections. However, consumers respond more favorably towards organic Br-UGC since the creation and facilitation intentions behind the content is more authentic than sponsored Br-UGC. When brands share Br-UGC on their social media, they should not only consider which content would best serve their marketing, but which content their consumers would prefer to see to optimize their social media marketing.
Future research should redesign the range value for the coding categories in order to better analyze the comment sections for Br–UGC. For example, instead of grouping the comments into “less than 50,” provide a “less than 10 comments” option. Additionally, future studies should filter out any comments made by the food brand from the list generated by Export Comments to accurately analyze audience engagement in the comment sections of Br–UGC. Moreover, other scholars should focus on analyzing more posts on other chains and small-businesses’ profiles.
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