The Antecedents and Consequences of Consumer Engagement in Social Networking Sites

Abstract

Consumer engagement is increasingly becoming one of the important issues in the competitive business environment. Both researches and practitioners are focusing on how consumer engagement can be enhanced through different channels. The emergence of social networks has significantly caused a shift in consumer behaviors and brand relationships. With its unique features and structure, Social Networking Sites (SNS) offer an upper advantage to build consumer brand relationships and instant consumer engagement. Although researchers and practitioners are giving so much importance to consumer engagement, there is still a need to understand what influences engagement and how engagement affects consumer behavior. Therefore, this study set out to determine the antecedents and consequences of consumer engagement in SNS. It further viewed consumer engagement as a multi-dimensional concept comprising behavioral, cognitive and emotional dimensions and as such the hypotheses were aimed at determining how each of the three dimensions of consumer engagement is affected from the customer related antecedents (involvement, satisfaction, commitment and trust) and affect the individual consequences of consumer engagement such as brand loyally and word of mouth. Research model is designed based on the model used by Malciute (2012). The study used a quantitative research design and developed a model that was based on the hypotheses developed for the study. It used a questionnaire survey to collect data from University students. Facebook is chosen as a case for this study. 400 questionnaires were collected and the analyses were conducted with the 387 valid questionnaire. The research data was analyzed by using SPSS and Lisrel programs. First a confirmatory factor analysis was conducted to test the measurement model and then the structural model was tested. The results suggest that emotional, behavioral and cognitive consumer engagement dimensions were significant predictors for brand loyalty. On the other hand only the emotional and cognitive consumer engagement dimensions were significant predictors for word-of-mouth. Involvement and commitment were found to be significant predictors for all engagement dimensions. Satisfaction predicts both emotional and end cognitive dimensions of engagement, whereas trust only predicts emotional consumer engagement. In sum, the study suggests satisfaction, involvement, commitment and trust to he possible antecedents of consumer engagement and brand loyalty and word-of-mouth to be possible consequences of consumer engagement in an online platform such as Facebook in our case.