Conceptualising and Measuring Consumer Engagement in Social Media Implications for Personal Involvement

Abstract

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.