Identifying the antecedents of posts’ popularity on Facebook fan pages

Informed by the related theories of agenda-setting and framing, the purpose of this paper is to identify the antecedents of posts’ popularity on Facebook Fan Pages. Posts’ popularity is conceptualized as the volumes of Likes, Comments and Shares attracted by the entries. Building on prior studies, the paper proposes a conceptual framework that identifies four categories of antecedents—presentation, brand awareness, engagement and temporal—that could be related to posts’ popularity on Facebook Fan Pages. The framework was validated by drawing 10,000 posts from 50 Facebook Fan Pages. The posts were measured in terms of the dimensions of the four categories. Hierarchical regression was used for analysis with volumes of Likes, Comments and Shares as the three separate dependent variables. Several dimensions from all the categories of antecedents were found to have a significant bearing on Likes, Comments and Shares. In particular, the presentation category emerged as being the most important in promoting posts’ popularity. The findings have implications for social media brand managers.