There is scarcity of studies on social media strategy, and their appropriate implementation, applied to the case multinational corporations. In particular; there is a lack of studies adopting a cross-cultural approach (Okazaki and Taylor, 2013). Behind this fact is the assumption that, in general, multinational corporations adopt a global strategy that does not fit well with the personalized nature of social media. From the perspective of social media management, there are a kind of dilemma between the adoption of a centralized and standardized content generation and diffusion approach vis á vis adopting a decentralization orientation at country level or even a more local level. Berthon, Pitt, Plangger, and Shapiro (2012) signal the challenge of standardizing corporate content in social media and point out the advantage of take into consideration the specificities of different cultures and countries. We found a tension between two trends, for one hand social media implies co-creation and the sharing the power between the firm and their customer, while global integrated marketing communications follow precisely the opposite route. This research was conducted to examine the influence of centralization degree of social media communication towards online customer. We develop an empirical study applied to more than 160 corporate Twitter accounts from Iberoamerican countries. These accounts are the universe of Spanish corporates accounts of a set of the most important global automobile brands over a two-month study period. We use post-level engagement metric as measure of consumers’ attitudinal responses to corporate tweets. The results indicate that online customer engagement is affected by the type of the social media account of the brand (global, country, distributor, event specific). A strategy of issuing tweets from more general and global account result in a greater impact on customer engagement. In general, it seems that a centralized strategy obtains more effect in the number of obtained retweets even controlling by content topic, sender and post characteristic. This research has important implications for Digital Managers of corporations in terms of better understanding and improving corporates’ strategy in the social media communication channels.

• Nora Lado(University Carlos III de Madrid, Spain)
• Manuel Ceballos(University Carlos III de Madrid, Spain)
• Angel Garcia-Crespo(University Carlos III de Madrid, Spain)