How does it make you feel?

Abstract: The rise of Social Network Sites (SNS) has had a huge impact on the field of public relations in that brands must now consider online branding as part of their strategy. This is a growing area of interest in both academia and practice as we strive to learn more about how to use the new platforms most effectively. In particular, SNS have encouraged the social role of brands and allow consumers engage directly with brands. This kind of engagement is a growing area of interest as brands interact with their customers directly and strive to stand out in the competitive online environment. In particular, the rise of image-sharing SNS mean that more brands are using visual content to convey their identity and engage consumers. It has been argued that the choice of such content is largely anecdotal and that brand managers tend to use their intuition when selecting material. This study aims to gain some theoretical understanding of how different types of content affect engagement and hence how brands can most effectively use visual content. The emotional aspect of engagement is of particular interest, therefore the study will examine whether the emotional content of images uploaded have an effect on engagement. The study will take a quantitative approach, using both content analysis and statistical analysis to determine the relationships between image content and engagement. The results of the research suggest that the content of images, including emotional content, have an impact on engagement, however do not fully explain engagement. The inclusion of brand name for images had a substantial effect on factors accounting for engagement, suggesting that the brand name is of more importance than the actual content when it comes to engagement –the importance of an image coming from a particular brand is higher than the actual content of the image itself consumers will like a certain brands’ posts regardless of the content. Overall, this research offers early insight into the factors affecting engagement in terms of the visual content that brands post on SNS.