Studying the Drivers of Consumer Behavioural Engagement With Social Media Brand-Related Content

Introduction

Nowadays, the role of social media in building successful brands and leveraging its online marketing activities is growing. Social media engagement is one of the most influential developments in brand management. Especially, with more than half of the world’s population, constituting some of 3.48 billion people are active users they spend on average 144 minutes daily, i.e., most of their working and personal time are on social media sites (SMS) (Smith, 2019; Veloutsou & Guzman, 2017). Consumers are experiencing a high level of engagement with brands on social media; thus, managers are forced to support brand success and secure its presence on social media.

It is expected that companies will raise their investments on social media to reach $48 billion in 2021 (Guttmann, 2018). Advancements in technology enabled an interactive engagement platform. Brand managers pursue social media users with brand fan pages on social media to interact, build long-term relationships and loyalty, which are used as a new avenue to gain competitive advantage. For example, in February 2020, Samsung has the highest number of followers (160 million) on its Facebook fan page and it is ranked among the top companies in the world in terms of market value (Clement, 2020; Statista Research Department, 2020). Moreover, Coca-Cola is one of the most recognisable brands on social media in 2020 with 107 million followers (Clement, 2020), ninety percent of them or even more are interacting with the brand posts on Facebook. The engagement of social media users is expressed by sharing, creating and reviewing brands which contribute much to the successfulness of the company’s social media campaign, e.g., #BTS_cocacola and #sharecoke (Nikolinakou & Phua, 2020).

Unsurprisingly, brand managers change their mindset and adopt new strategies to cultivate and stimulate consumer online responses (Kohli et al., 2015), and elicit voluntary interactions of consumers with brand -related content on social media. This type of engagement that support the behavioural manifestation perspective (van Doorn et al., 2010) is a critical element in brand strategy and an indicator of brand performance. It is also used as a quantitative measure of social media engagement (Mishra, 2019; Schivinski et al., 2019a). Therefore, the development of brand engagement that provokes consumer’s interaction and participation with the brand-related content expressed by consuming (read the content), creating, and/or contribution (like or comments) is a top priority for executives (de Vries et al., 2017; Gummerus et al., 2012; Schivinski et al., 2019b).

Brands across different industries are creating social media presence by having multiple accounts on different platforms to entice consumer participation. The interactive nature of the hosted media allows the brand to share and create content such as product information, customer services, special offers and other benefits leveraged by consumer engagement (Mishra, 2019; Simon & Tossan, 2018). It is important to understand the drivers of online engagement to encourage and enhance consumers engagement with brand-related social media content.