Despite the longevity and popularity of the Internal marketing (IM) in the service literature, its structure is yet unclear (Ballantyne, 2003; Huang & Rundle-Thiele, 2015; Qaisar & Muhamad, 2021; Tsai & Tang, 2008). The literature on Employee Engagement (EE) explains the employees’ emotional commitment and their psychological presence in their job and organization, but it lacks of a concurrence regarding its definition and its measurement (Kossyva et al., 2022). Despite the importance and dynamism of the Higher Education (HE) sector, there is only scant research data of IM and EE in HEIs (Tsarakhova & Kabanov, 2020; Vel et al., 2019; Vieira-dos Santos & Gonçalves, 2018; Yildiz & Kara, 2017).

This paper presents an in-depth analysis of a random sample of 100 consecutive Facebook posts by a specialist industrial firm which is its industry leader in terms of brand performance on Social Media. It demonstrates how the messages content, encoding, and interactivity strategies achieve the Page’s audience engagement.

Via an exploratory survey we decoded the interplay of the multiple points of attachment leading the consumer to the soccer field. Results indicate that local soccer player brands’ conceptual property which lies with the shared bond of team identification and is leveraged reciprocally, adds both to the human and the organizational brand equity.