MESSAGE STRATEGIES TO INCREASE FACEBOOK ENGAGEMENT

The current marketing trend demanded the Food Safety and Quality Division Ministry of Health Malaysia to explore relevant social media strategies to be incorporated into the division marketing mix to encourage social media user engagement with a post posted during the Food Safety Campaign in 2017 and 2018. Thus, a study was conducted to explore the message strategy incorporated in the post. The study used quantitative content analysis to collect data from forty Facebook status that related to the social media campaign. The study appointed two coders during the data collection process to minimise the reliability issue. The data were analysed descriptively to identify relevance message strategies embedded in the post. The study divided message strategy into four different categories namely the posting format, posting strategy, tone of a post, and prompting engagement. The results indicated that appealing video and photo could increase Facebook user engagement such as comment, share, likes, emojis, and tagging the post. Also, source credibility is found contributed to increase Facebook user engagement. Besides, emotional posts, either in a video, photos, or text will encourage the Facebook user to engage. The study also discovered that motion or static info graphics are highly contributed to Facebook user engagement. (C) 2021 Published by European Publisher.