Research On Impact Of Brand Post Image-Text Matching On Consumer Engagement In Social Media

With an increasingly large social media user base,social media is becoming a mainstream channel for brand executives to engage and sustain consumers.Brands use social media posts to deliver product information to consumers through communication and interaction,which can help consumers understand more about the product,improve their awareness of the brand and enhance interaction with the brand.Social media posts can present content in a variety of formats,with text and images being by far the most used ways to present product information to consumers in a comprehensive manner through visual presentation and verbal description.However,the impact of matching effects of images and text in the same post describing product information on consumer engagement has not been fully explored in the social media domain.Therefore,this paper aims to explore the impact of image-text matching on consumer engagement in social media brand postings,with a view to enriching the research on the factors influencing consumer engagement,as well as providing guidance to brand managers in typesetting and designing the content of image-text-combined posts.This paper focuses on the image-text matching effect,and investigates whether the information conveyed by pictures should be consistent with the text,i.e.,whether the external display content of pictures is compatible with the inner core expression of the text.Since previous studies on social media posts have mostly focused on the role of plain text or certain attributes of images on consumer engagement,the combination of images and text has been less explored.Therefore,this paper presents for the first time the importance and necessity of studying image-text matching,summarizes previous studies on the content of images and text in social media brand posts,and builds a research model on the impact of image-text matching on consumer engagement in social media brand posts under different product types by referring to relevant literature on image and text messages in the fields of consumer behavior and psychology.In this paper,we use Python software to collect image and text content for social media posts of different product types(experience-based and search-based)brands,and obtain a total of 670 texts,1516 images,and consumer engagement(sum of likes,comments,and shares)for each post.Machine learning algorithms are used to identify image features(image color,image texture,image shape)and textual theme features of social media brand posts,quantify information about product appearance and intrinsic attributes,and measure image-text matching by calculating distance.Regression analysis of the sample data was conducted using SPSS software to test the moderating effect of image-text matching on the effect of consumer engagement and the moderating effect of product type.The experimental results show that image-text matching of social media brand posts has a significant positive impact on consumer engagement.There is a moderating effect of product type between image-text matching and consumer engagement,and the image-text matching of search-based product brand postings can have a more significant impact on consumer engagement than for experiential products.Based on the results of the experiment,guidance is provided on how brand social media managers can design post content that combines images and text to improve consumer engagement.