Abstract
Despite Instagram’s popularity among the Y and Z generation consumers, social media research investigating factors that can influence customer engagement on Instagram remains limited. The uses and gratifications theory underpins this study which investigates how social media marketing of prominent Malaysian brands on Instagram impacts customer engagement. ScrapeStorm web scraper tool was used to extract posts and comments from the public Instagram accounts of four notable Malaysian brands. The findings reveal that different features of social media, affect consumer engagement differently. Social media influencers had a positive impact on consumption and creation-based customer engagement. Contextual features are negatively correlated with contribution-based customer engagement. In terms of content, videos had greater engagement rates, followed by images of people and images without people. Results also show that consumers reacted positively to informative textual content. Some implications for theory and practice are highlighted.
Highlights
Often associated with community, transparency, conversation, and connectedness (Power, 2014), social media encourages two-way communication, feedback, and information-sharing (Mutum and Wang, 2011)
This study evaluates the effect of textual content on customer engagement using criteria introduced by Dolan et al (2016) in their study of social media engagement behavior from a uses and gratification theory (UGT) perspective
Past research on Instagram has focused on contribution-based customer engagement, namely, likes and comments and studies taking a holistic view of customer engagement remain scarce, especially in the Malaysian context
Summary
Transparency, conversation, and connectedness (Power, 2014), social media encourages two-way communication, feedback, and information-sharing (Mutum and Wang, 2011). Malaysians are motivated to use social media to learn about new events and updates, keep in touch with friends, share content, find funny and engaging content, complete work tasks, and research or discover new products to buy (Seraph Studio, 2019; YouGov, 2019). These data imply that social media is becoming more substantial in the lives of Malaysians, as compared to traditional media. Among the social media platforms, Instagram is ranked fourth, after Facebook, YouTube, and WhatsApp, with 11 million active monthly users (Kemp 2018).
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