How should B2B firms create image content for high social media engagement? A multimodal analysis

Purpose This study evaluates the effect of the media image content of business to business (B2B) organizations to accelerate social media engagement. It highlights the importance of strategically designing image content for business marketing strategies. Design/methodology/approach This study designed a computation extensive research model based upon the stimulus-organism-response (SOR) theory using 39,139 Facebook posts of 125 organizations selected from Fortune 500 firms. Attributes from images and text were estimated using deep learning models. Subsequently, inferential analysis was established with ordinary least squares regression. Further machine learning algorithms, like support vector regression, k-nearest neighbour, decision tree and random forest, are used to analyze the significance and robustness of the proposed model for predicting engagement metrics. Findings The results indicate that the social media (SM) image content of B2B firms significantly impacts their social media engagement. The visual and linguistic attributes are extracted from the image using deep learning. The distinctive effect of each feature on social media engagement (SME) is empirically verified in this study. Originality/value This research presents practical insights formulated by embedding marketing, advertising, image processing and statistical knowledge of SM analytics. The findings of this study provide evidence for the stimulating effect of image content concerning SME. Based on the theoretical implications of this study, marketing and media content practitioners can enhance the efficacy of SM posts in engaging users.