Social media marketing for businesses: Organic promotions of web-links on Facebook

The effectiveness of social media marketing is a topic of great interest for researchers as well as marketers. To enrich the literature regarding the effectiveness of various types of posts with a web-link, we designed and conducted an experiment on Facebook (FB). This experiment was conducted in a real business environment, through the FB fanpage of a Polish e-commerce store. The observations were analyzed using multiple linear regression and metrics adapted to this experiment from the literature. The results show that a web-link placed in the comments of an FB post, instead of the caption, is more lucrative. It is also shown that, based on the aims of the campaign, such metrics can give valuable information about the optimal time for posting, as well as the interval between posts.