Conceptualising and Measuring Consumer Engagement in Social Media Implications for Personal Involvement
Streszczenie
Background. Consumer engagement with brands in social media has become an increasingly
important challenge for companies to create and to measure. Building fan engagement with
brands turns out to be one of the most important promotional objectives for social media,
and a preferred brand performance indicator. Despite a growing demand, it has received
little academic consideration and there exists no universally accepted measurement of this
phenomenon.
Research aims. This paper aims at forwarding a new theoretical framework and developing
a context free index to measure aggregate engagement with brands in social media.
Method. The author developed a new engagement index and examined it by means of
standard index validation methods. Two separate studies have been conducted. In the first
study, two samples (425 subjects in total) were selected to test internal reliability and consistency
of a newly created index. The second study concentrated on the external validation
of engagement index. 260 subjects were surveyed. The index was tested on real-life brands
i.e. McDonald"s and Coca-Cola.
Key findings. In the first study factor analyses showed one general factor and it revealed
high consistency across different brands that were included in the examination. The newly
developed index was, therefore, assumed applicable to measure consumer engagement
phenomena in social media. In the second study the results revealed a positive # albeit limited
# correlation between personal involvement and consumer engagement. Such findings
implied a complementary relationship between these variables and hence different possible
implications and suggestions for future empirical research were presented.
Collections