Fly “With us”! Impact of Consumer-Brand Relationship on Consumer Engagement: An Empirical Investigation on Turkish Airline Instagram Pages

Leading consumers to engage with brand posts in social media has become one of essential branding strategies for airline industry. Linguistic characteristics of a social media message can also play an important role to increase consumer engagement (CE) level. This study investigates the effects of the uses of pronouns and “we” as a consumer-brand (cb) relationship on CE with Turkish airline Instagram posts considering Social Presence Theory. Multiple Linear Regression (MLR) analysis using least squares model are conducted to analyze 817 Instagram data. The findings indicate that the use of first-person singular, first-person plural, third-person singular, and second-person pronouns in Instagram posts increase CE. Also, the use of “we-biz” as c-b relationship affect both liking and commenting behavior of consumers.