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Social networking is providing a whole new level of communication between marketers and consumers (Shareef et al, 2019). Indeed, 4.20 billion are on social media out of 4.66 billion on internet (Annual Digital Report, 2021), therefor, countless consumers and potential consumers can be reached through various digital channels: emails, social networking sites, blogs and micro-blogs, peer review or referral sites, and social content sites. Hence, more companies are encouraged to use social media as an important part of their online marketing strategies (Chen & Lin, 2019) as more people are joining social network sites suggesting to conduct a new business platform in e-commerce, known as social commerce (Abdelsalam et al, 2020).
Many organizations use social media to promote their products, as well as simply share information (Golijan, 2011) as it is an ideal form of communication to reach a large audience as well as specific targeted audience that do not require any financial resources (Michaelidou et al, 2011). Social media bring an interesting dynamic to the sales and marketing interface at which customers want to voice their concerns and want to be educated on products and services as a move from passive to active presence, (Liu, 2012; Marshall et al., 2012).
Stephen, (2016) assured that most of consumer marketing in the future will be carried out in digital settings, particularly social media. With the increased use of social media marketing by several types of brands, it has become crucial to study and analyze this phenomenon. The value of social media data is rarely discovered, analyzed and visualized (Hajli & Laroche, 2019). Thus, studying the consequences of social media marketing is the main purpose of this research targeting to spot more light on this new technological marketing communication strategy through investigating the effect of social media marketing on brand loyalty.
Smartphones have become an inseparable part of our daily lives. Nowadays, smartphones and social media go hand in hand as 92.6% of global browsing social media is through smartphones (Annual Digital Report, 2021). In recent years, mobile devices have taken social media marketing to a whole new level as users continually choose to access their networks remotely, via smartphones, tablets, and laptops. Therefore, studying the effect of social media marketing on brand loyalty among smartphone users in Egypt will enhance marketers' understanding and knowledge about consequences of social media marketing and factors affecting this relationship.
The scientific contribution can be presented through several points. Based on the challenge of how organizations can figure out the results of Social media marketing (Costa et al, 2018) especially in the light of the scientific gap represented in the contradiction between previous researches’ results, this study is among the first to fill the gap through testing the consequences of social media marketing in terms of brand loyalty among smartphone users in Egypt. Moreover, in a trial to extent the theoretical contribution, the current study different from previous studies, investigated the role of demographics and psychographics in the relationship between social media marketing and brand loyalty among smartphone users in Egypt.
The causal research design has been used as it is the only research design that enables exploring the cause-effect relationships through executing experiment (Sekaran & Bougie, 2016, El-Assi, 2019). Ex-post facto experimental design, different from previous studies, has been chosen to achieve the research objectives. It hasn’t been studied in social media marketing context in Egyptian or foreign contexts which will support the causality of the relationships and enhance the scientific contribution of the current study.