Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate how nonprofit service providers can better engage their customers through online communication. It identifies two communication styles and three communication functions, and examines their impact on customer commenting, customer liking and customer sharing. Design/methodology/approach Similar to Python for Facebook, a software package for the automatic retrieval of web page content was developed specifically for this study to extract data from the microblog Sina Weibo. Following the successful retrieval of 1,500 randomly selected messages from 34 universities in China, a two-level regression was performed using Mplus 7 to examine the association between the proposed relationships. Findings The findings reveal that messages with a friendly communication style increase both the number of comments and their positive tone; an authoritative style has no effect on customer engagement. The functions associated with message content (spreading information, building community or promoting action) influence customer liking and sharing. Building community tends to engage more customers than spreading information; promoting action often generates the least customer engagement in social media settings. Originality/value The study fills an important research gap in the service marketing literature as it pertains to nonprofit service organizations (i.e. universities) by identifying two types of online identities based on the communication style and the messages posted on social media. This study is the first to investigate the relationship between identity type and audience engagement, and to analyze the moderating factors of this relationship.