Retailer Differentiation in Social Media: An Investigation of Firm-Generated Content on Twitter.

This article investigates how traditional retail competitors differentiate their content strategies on Twitter (now known as X) and the impact of such differentiation on social media engagement and follower growth. Using a novel dataset of 877,484 firm-initiated tweets from 199 large North American retail firms between 2012 and 2017, the study measures content similarity with top competitors via cosine similarity of textual data and classifies tweets into ten categories grouped into three tiers—"Content," "Community," and "Cocreation"—based on Twitter's social media affordances. The findings reveal that firms whose Twitter content is more dissimilar from that of their closest traditional rivals, particularly by leveraging higher-tier affordances involving community-building and user cocreation, achieve significantly higher engagement and faster follower acquisition. The study offers a hierarchical framework for social media content strategies and suggests that firms benefit from actively differentiating their social media presence by adopting innovative, interactive content beyond basic information dissemination.