Ten years after Barger et al. (2016) reviewed consumer engagement on social media, this article revisits how engagement is measured. It reviews and integrates language-based measures of engagement, develops a conceptual framework and proposes a research agenda.
The article reviews the marketing and adjacent literature on measuring engagement from text, including natural language processing and large language model methods, organized by the cognitive, emotional and behavioral dimensions of engagement and across both the consumer and the firm.
Engagement counts capture the act of engagement but not its content. Language-based methods can in principle recover the cognitive and emotional dimensions that the consumer brand engagement construct names but that behavioral counts do not reach. The article maps the linguistic signals and measurement approaches available for each dimension on both sides of the consumer-firm dyad, separates what the literature supports from what remains to be done and identifies the conversation, rather than the isolated post, as the unit at which the co-creative process becomes measurable.
The article offers a framework that (1) distinguishes the engagement act from engagement content and positions language-based measurement as the means of recovering the latter, (2) extends to both parties of the consumer-firm dyad and locates the conversation as the unit of analysis, (3) states five testable propositions with boundary conditions and (4) sets out a prioritized agenda for research.
