Hooking Customers with Facebook: An Empirical Analysis of Grocery Stores’ Online Engagement

Social media is an integral part of today's society. Local grocery stores therefore increasingly maintain an online presence through their own brand pages. However, these stores employ different social media strategies: Some follow the centralized communication strategy of the supermarket chain, while others create their own localized content, potentially resulting in varying engagement levels (i.e., likes, comments, and shares). Locally created content may be perceived as more authentic and unique and might evoke a feeling of groundedness, compared with centrally created content. This study examines the impact of brand posts and page characteristics on social media engagement using data consisting of 2,700 brand posts across 135 grocery stores. The findings show that conveying a sense of locality, through either store-specific content or posts created by the local store itself, indeed significantly boosts engagement. These insights can help local grocery stores refine their social media strategies to reach local audiences better.