Driving consumer engagement for digital payment brands: Content strategy on instagram

The purpose of this two-part mixed-methods based study is to understand the effect of content characteristics of brand-posted social media content on consumer engagement in the recently emerged and rapidly growing unified payments interface (UPI) based digital payments sector in India. The Study 1 uses Instagram data collected using the Apify tool, an Instagram Scraper, for four leading UPI brands in India over eight months. Linear regression was performed on the dataset with likes as the dependent variable and content vividness, content appeal, and content interactivity as the independent variables. The qualitative Study 2, based on semi structured interviews of Instagram users who make UPI payments, corroborates Study 1, and provides a richer, more nuanced understanding of the phenomenon. For UPI brands, we found that entertaining and remunerative appeals are more effective than other content appeals in generating likes on Instagram. This research does not find a positive effect of relational appeal over information appeal on the number of likes, indicating that content with relational appeal is not very effective for UPI brands. Further, this study suggests interesting findings about the role of interactivity and vividness in driving consumer engagement on social media platforms. This study is among the first to focus on increasing consumer engagement with brand-posted social media content in the context of the nascent, high-potential, and rapidly growing UPI-based digital payments sector in India.