Social media engagement: a construct of positively and negatively valenced engagement behaviours

Abstract

The advent of social media has changed the way customers and organisations interact. Customers have transformed from passive recipients of marketing content, to active participants in the brand message. While the traditional marketing communications paradigm is characterised by a high degree of managerial control and one-way brand messages, customer interactions with the brand and with each other through social media results in brand-related dialogues regarding which managers have little direct control in terms of the content, timing and frequency (Mangold and Faulds, 2009). Social media sites provide an ideal platform for brand-related advocacy (Chu and Kim, 2011; Riegner, 2007), customer-led content generation (Vivek, Beatty, and Morgan, 2012), and customer-to-customer interaction (Heller Baird and Parasnis, 2011). Organisations are increasingly recognising and utilising this opportunity, with more than 15 million brands registered with the social media site Facebook (Koetsier, 2013) As businesses seek to communicate with customers through the social medium more effectively, it offers a signifi cant research area for scholars to better anticipate and understand consumer engagement in online social groups and subsequent brand-related behaviours (Pagani, Hofacker, and Goldsmith, 2011; Pelling and White, 2009). This chapter seeks to provide a deeper understanding of the engagement behaviours customers exhibit on social media, through the identifi cation and explanation of different types of engagement behaviour in this forum.