Motives of Social Media Usage on Building Consumer Behavioural Engagement

Abstract

Social media plays a pivotal role in the present digitalized business context by reshaping the marketing strategies of business entities by focusing greater level of consumer engagement. The consumer participation in brand building activities has become a mainstream research concern over social media marketing. Despite the different marketing and promotional efforts taken by marketers, recent studies emphasis more on investigating level of consumer engagement within contemporaneous digital platforms. Alongside, this study attempted to investigate the consumer behavioural engagement in social media marketing, and it was conceptualized based on self – determination theory. Accordingly, consumer autonomy, competence, and relatedness were tested with consumer behavioural engagement in social media marketing. Following a deductive method as the approach, a comprehensive literature review was conducted to construct the study hypotheses. Survey method was used to collect data from a sample of 246 undergraduates in both state and private sector higher educational institutes. The analysis was based on both descriptive and inferential analysis, to understand the relationship between key consumer autonomy, competence, and relatedness towards behavioural engagement. Findings reveal that the consumer competence over social media platforms is the most important determinant of one’s self – determination. Further, the behavioural engagement of consumers is highly influenced by consumer relatedness, showing favourable relationships among both community relatedness as well as brand relatedness. Some of the determinants such as self-censorship and privacy concerns were identified as no significant relationship with consumer behavioural engagement. It provided a considerable amount of interesting findings for practitioner for developing effective marketing and promotional campaigns in the context of social media to gain a greater level of consumer behavioural engagement. Finally, the study was concluded with important insights about the consumer behavioural engagement in social media marketing with some recommended practices for higher achievements.

Keywords: Autonomy, Self – censorship, Self – Efficacy, Relatedness, Behavioural engagement