Listen to your customers! A study about content creation on social media to enhance customer engagement

It is a major challenge for many organisations to create content on social media which leads to customer engagement. The purpose of this research is to develop a framework that contains a strategy for creating content which leads to customer engagement. For developing a framework, a Design Science Research Methodology is applied. Based on the literature and expert-interviews, five elements have emerged that are essential: the goal, target audience, listening, content creation, and evaluation. The element listening, is crucial when creating content. Listening helps to discover the customer’s interests, so that an organisation can respond to this. The sub-elements of listening are: listening to influencers, listening to what is said about your brand and competitor, discovering channel preferences, discovering customer motives, and discovering customer interests. Listening allows organisations to determine several content characteristics that influences customer engagement. A case study is used in order to validate the use of the framework. The case study shows that this framework is a useful guide to determine the content for achieving customer engagement. The case study also shows that in practice little attention is paid to listening in relation to content creation.