Exploring the effect of user engagement in online brand communities: Evidence from Twitter

Abstract

Social media such as forums, blogs and microblogs has been increasingly used for public information sharing and opinions exchange nowadays. It has changed the way how online community interacts and somehow has led to a new trend of engagement for online retailers especially on microblogging websites such as Twitter. In this study, we investigated the impact of online retailers' engagement with the online brand communities on users' perception of brand image and service. Firstly, we analysed the overall sentiment trends of different brands and the patterns of engagement between companies and customers using the collected tweets posted on a popular social media platform, Twitter. Then, we studied how different types of engagements affect customer sentiments. Our analysis shows that engagement has an effect on sentiments that associate with brand image, perception and customer service of the online retailers. Our findings indicate that the level, length, type and attitude of retailers' engagement with social media users have a significant impact on their sentiments. Based on our results, we derived several important managerial and practical implications.

Developing effective social media messages: Insights from an exploratory study of industry experts

“…Furthermore, online communities are used by brands to collect relevant insights and knowledge relating to their business activities (Adjei, Noble, & Noble, ). Thus interactivity through communities from shared information can lead to attitude change, cognitive involvement in the SM experience, and influence SM users’ feelings (Ibrahim et al, ; Smith & Gallicano, ). SM experts also suggest that interactivity through convincing storytelling is an effective approach to influencing users’ attitudes and intentions.…”

“…From a marketing communications perspective, social media (SM) provides a vehicle for companies to share information relating to their brands, and a forum for consumers to interact with other users in their network (Kumar, Choi, & Greene, ; Rapp, Beitelspacher, Grewal, & Hughes, ). SM has become a key area of research on brands as it offers the opportunity to use interactive platforms for the creation and exchange of information, and exploits its marketing potential (Ibrahim, Wang, & Bourne, ). In recent years, the popularity of SM for connecting and cooperating with customers has increased significantly.…”

The Influence of Social Media Communication on Consumer's Attitudes and Behavioral Intentions Concerning Brand-Sponsored Events

“…In the SM context, research on the consumer's exposure to SM brand-related communication was shown to positively impact perceptions of brands (Bruhn et al, 2012;Schivinski & Dabrowski, 2015. Although SM brand-related communication appears to influence consumers' attitudes, its investigation is still warranted given that the literature on SM brand-related communication is scattered (Moro, Rita, & Vala, 2016), and varies across industries and sources (Bruhn et al, 2012;Schivinski & Dabrowski, 2015, contexts (Ibrahim, Wang, & Bourne, 2017), and business orientations (Huotari, Ulkuniemi, Saraniemi, & Mäläskä, 2015). To advance research on the effects of SM brandrelated communication on consumers' attitudes and a priori in which consumers exposed to this type of communication are positively influenced in their intentions to participate in brand-sponsored events.…”

Relationship Analysis on the Experience of Hospitalised Paediatric Cancer Patient in Malaysia using Text Analytics Approach

“…According to [27], Text Mining (TM) can be defined as an analytic process that is designed to explore the unstructured text documents in search of useful information and knowledge hidden from a large amount of text resources. TM has been widely applied in many application domains such as military knowledge [28][29][30][31], business analytics [32][33][34], documents analysis [35][36][37], social media issues [38][39][40], etc. In this research, TM which is one of DM method is explored as to find new knowledge through examining qualitative data of patient experiences while having chemo treatment [20,21].…”