How to attract image-conscious consumers? Brand names vs new collections

Purpose This study aims to understand luxury brands’ communication strategies on social media and to evaluate the effectiveness of marketer-generated content (MGC) on Twitter. Design/methodology/approach MGC’s characteristics in terms of media richness, content orientation, media type and post-timing were examined. The data from luxury handbag brands posted in 2022 were collected using Vicinitas. The final data set includes a total of 9,977 tweets from 18 brands. Tweets were analyzed using Latent Dirichlet Allocation and multiple regression with robust standard errors. To facilitate interpretations, word clouds were also used. Findings Empirical results demonstrated that context-specific topics exist. These topics together with information richness, content orientation, media type and timing factors significantly affected consumer engagement. Frequent keywords used in tweets in terms of influential context-specific topic and hashtags were shown. Research limitations/implications This study extends theories on engagement on SM, provides deep insights for luxury brand literature, offers recommendations for luxury handbag brand managers to evaluate and further revise their strategies. Practical implications Luxury handbag brands should talk more about their new collections, use more hashtags, mentions and graphics interchange format media types, avoid using only texts and long message lengths, choose photos over videos and post in the afternoon rather than in the evening to increase engagement. Originality/value This research determines effective types of content which should be used by luxury brands and presents new insights regarding social media engagement specifically for luxury products. Despite the fact that past research mainly focused on Facebook, this paper examines activities in Twitter and MGC, which are arguably faster growing platforms.