Consumer and brand engagement on Facebook brand pages

Abstract

Social media has sparked a remarkable change in the way brands engage with consumers and has empowered consumers to collectively voice their opinions with unprecedented scale. Challenged by the empowerment that consumers have gained, marketers are continuously engaging consumers through dedicated brand communities on social media platforms. Facebook brand pages are widely used by brands to engage with consumers because they support multi-way interactions between brands and consumers and among consumers themselves. These interactive experiences are what marketers call consumer brand engagement, a concept with much debate as to its scope and dimensions, but less attention is given to decipher the intricacies between brand engagement and consumer engagement behaviors, to understand its emotional dynamics, and to examine the role of webcare strategies to manage consumer conversations on Facbook brand pages. To fill those gaps, this thesis contains three co-authored papers. The first paper is an empirical analysis of the interplay between brand engagement and consumer engagement behaviors as well as among consumers themselves on Facebook brand pages. The paper develops a conceptual model of engagement behaviors, translates its components into measurable constructs and empirically investigates the effects of brand engagement on consumer engagement and among consumers in 2,740 Facebook brand pages. The second paper examines the impact of 64,347 webcare interventions embedded within 24,557 consumer conversations on Facebook brand Pages to determine whether type (proactive versus of reactive), voice (personal versus impersonal), timing (early versus late) and number (single versus multiple) of webcare interventions influence the volume and valence of consumer conversations. The third paper tackles the emotional perspective of consumer brand engagement. Drawing on emotional branding and contagion research, the paper examines the dynamics of emotional brand content and consumer reactions in 942 Facebook brand pages.