Article Preview
TopIntroduction
Social networking sites have become an indispensable part of over four billion users’ lives across the world (Hosen, et al., 2021). Such ubiquitous social networking sites have opened up multiple avenues for marketers to reach both existing and new customers (Gupta & Ramachandran, 2021). Digital media spending in the last decade has grown multi-fold, and in 2018, companies spent over 200 billion dollars on digital ads, amounting to about 45% of the total ad spend. It is expected to increase beyond USD 500 billion in the next five years (Enberg, 2019) and soar up to USD 4,414 billion by 2030 (Research and Markets, 2021, Apr 15). Globally, the digital contents market is expected to surpass USD 38 billion by 2030 (Bloomberg, 2021). A large proportion of this growth has been fuelled by Social Networking Sites (SNSs) (Shi et al., 2018). These sites leverage user-generated content and provide customers with the opportunity to share and interact with fellow site members. These include sites such as Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Weibo (Hosen, et al., 2021). Facebook recorded a revenue of over 16 billion dollars in quarter 4 of 2018, with daily active users of about 1.5 billion in the same period. As of July 2021, Facebook tops the chart with the most active users worldwide (Statista, 2021). Facebook accounts for a fourth of the US digital spend, and a tenth of the total spend on advertising across channels (eMarketer, 2018). Twitter’s ad revenue jumped 23% to 791 million dollars in the same period (Gesenhues, 2019). In addition, customers’ average time spent on social media has increased to 2 hours and 15 minutes per day, surpassing that spent on television (Cooper, 2020). Given this, academicians and marketers have been devoting considerable attention to social media, with Social Networking Sites (SNSs) at the forefront of this research growth (Boyd & Ellison, 2007; Ellison et al., 2007; Hollebeek et al., 2017; Jaakkola & Alexander, 2014a; Kumar & Pansari, 2016; Valenzuela et al., 2009).
SNSs have entirely changed customer-firm interactions for the foreseeable future by providing customers with opportunities to engage with organisations in a personalised, quick, and seamless manner (Halawani et al., 2020; Harrigan et al., 2018). SNSs provide a novel way of interacting with the customers, wherein the customers are contributors, collaborators, and consumers simultaneously (Vakeel & Panigrahi, 2018). Customers participate in various stages of the marketing value chain, ranging from product innovation, advertising, merchandising, and acquisition & retention (Malthouse et al., 2013; Nambisan, 2002).
Research in the area of customer engagement in SNS consists of studies in multiple contexts. For instance, Lin & Wang (2020) found that gender influences users' behaviour while sharing information on social media. Females are more concerned about the risks related to privacy, and males are concerned over other SNS users’ opinions. Jani et al. (2020) studied the relationship between brands and customer engagement on SNS and found that perceived relationship (between brands and customers), rewards (such as credits or points), and posts by brands (advertisements by the brand) positively impact customer engagement. Organisations have to continuously focus on improving their services as consumers have access to enormous amounts of information on websites. They compare specifications and reviews of other users before purchasing any product. The increasing consumer activity influences web-based entrepreneurship (Momen et al., 2020).