Getting the attention of consumers is one of the major goals of marketing communications and the creative format of marketing messages can be taken up as a significant factor in that regard. According to the Elaboration Likelihood Model, which is widely used in the literature on advertising and electronic word-of-mouth (e-WOM), in low involvement situations, consumers tend to employ a peripheral route for processing information and they engage in more subconscious processing of stimuli [
40]. In situations where focusing on a specific message element is not a viable option, affective components and peripheral cues (e.g., animation, music, and/or color) become more instrumental in attitude changes and behavior patterns [
41]. Considering that past research on banner ads indicates that the majority of consumers exhibit low levels of involvement when browsing the Internet [
42], creative formatting’s role in online brand communication becomes evident. As with other types of digital marketing communication, BFP posts can be created in several formats: text only, images/photos (static visuals) or animated photos/videos (dynamic visuals). In the literature, the “vividness” factor has been put forward as a way to evaluate the stimulation level of a message for viewers [
43] and help us understand the effects of creative format. When a message caters to more than one sense, it becomes more vivid, so one would expect that using sounds or visuals in a message would be a good means of getting more attention [
44]. Studies on the issue have found that animations and videos are more vivid than pictures and text-only posts and the use of photos and videos garners more attention than text-only posts [
41,
42,
45]. Similarly, the literature on web advertising also indicates that banner ads with highly vivid content (e.g., animations) are more effective in attaining higher click-through rates and greater advertising involvement [
41,
45,
46]. Several studies on social media have also observed a similar positive relationship between vivid content and interactions [
10,
11,
15,
16,
47]. For instance, a study in Singapore on multiple consumer industries [
38], others in the fashion industry [
13], the travel industry in Spain [
15] and the hospitality industry in Turkey [
48], found that vivid brand posts (e.g., images and videos) lead to more interactions per follower than their less vivid counterparts (text-only posts). The question of whether images or videos are more influential in attaining higher levels of interaction is open to debate, as several studies have produced contradictory findings. According to Brookes [
49], images prompt more engagement than video and text posts and videos outperform text-only posts. It has been argued that there is an optimum level of vividness on social media in terms of generating a positive influence on engagement, after which the positive effect diminishes [
14]. Moreover, studies on banner advertisements in which no significant effects for animated content were observed [
50,
51] or heterogeneity was detected, for example, [
39] would suggest that there is a need for further research to investigate one of the most critical dimensions of the creative format of posts—the vividness factor—in more detail. Thus, investigating the use of short and long videos and differing types of images may help us gain deeper insights into this matter.
In contrast to the use of static or dynamic elements, inherently interactive content (e.g., questions and sweepstakes) that is posted on BFPs may also provide an avenue for improving follower engagement. That proposition has been confirmed by several studies on social media consumer behavior in which interactivity was found to affect customer interaction, engagement and involvement [
10,
11,
13,
21,
36,
38,
48,
52]. Within that context, interactivity can be defined as “the degree to which two or more communication parties can act on each other, on the communication medium and on the messages and the degree to which such influences are synchronized” [
53]. Interactive posts can take several forms, such as questionnaires, short polls, contests, links to websites, gamification elements or hashtags and the level of interactivity offered may vary. They can be presented in a textual format or supported with rich visuals, depending on the type of interaction offered. However, while the majority of studies have supported the use of interactive elements, others have highlighted the adverse effects of interactive elements such as links or pointed to a lack of significant impact on interactions, for example, Reference [
15].