• Asia pacific journal of information systems
• /
• v.31 no.2
• /
• pp.197-219
• /
• 2021

Social media platforms have become prominent channels for e-commerce, and the role of social network sites' (SNS) content marketing is expanding as a strategic marketing communication approach to attract and retain consumers and increase sales. In this study, we focused on South Korea market and explored the influence of linguistic complexity and informality on consumer engagement. In particular, we identified the importance of complexity, focusing on its negative effects, as well as the moderating effect of commerce features to minimize these effects. Specifically, content length, hashtags, long words, and average sentence length significantly and negatively impacted consumer engagement. The influence of emojis, an informality variable, was not statistically significant. Shoppable tags, a commerce feature that provides both advertising explicitness and shopping convenience, were a moderating factor in the influence of complexity. Our findings provide new insights for content marketing researchers, and have practical implications for social media managers and content developers.