Customer and Firm Interaction on Social Media Platforms: Characterization and Analysis

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Firms and customers are increasingly exploiting social media platforms as an efficient communication channels. Even after many years of research on customer and firm interaction through social media, little attention has been paid to user characteristics in social media and specifically in fan pages. Also, there are few studies that directly addresses the advantages of using social media for interaction instead of other traditional media. For wise investments in social media, studying user behaviour would be considered the primary step. Studies in marketing have mostly concentrated on adapting user strategies by applying customer theories and expanding traditional media functionalities in social media contexts. But in IS literature, less attention has been paid to identifying users’ and firms’ tactics in employing different mechanisms within social media. Also, the research to address social media features as enablers of user and firm interaction and study the motivation of each party is limited. In this research, I aim to contribute to the social media literature by addressing those overlooked areas. In this study, the researcher’s motivation is to determine what drives the adoption and adaptation of the different user behaviour and firm strategies from the customer’s behaviour and the information system perspective. This inquiry is projected in two phases. First, I used an inductive data-driven approach to characterize and identify user strategies in a firm’s SM presence. The achieved taxonomy in this stage contrasts the users’ strategies in relation to their activities in the firms’ SM environment. Second, it is intended to study the fundamental drivers of SM usage in relation to other media in customer and firm interaction. So it will elucidate why users prefer different schemes of participation in fan pages. I intend to develop an explanatory model to advance evolution of users’ adaptation and effective behavioural factors. In this regard, I propose two distinct but related research questions. In the first research question, characterization of different user behaviour in interaction with firms on social media is intended. In the second research question, the investigation of motivation and applicability of social media by firms and users as firms’ potential customers is planned. For the first question, I could collect data of specified companies from Facebook and Twitter using iterative method with software agent. For the second research question I have planned to use survey as data gathering method for mining user motivation. Classification based on cluster analysis is the method for analysing the first research question. To analyse the data for the second question, I intend to use content analysis and structural equation modelling for establishing a model. The anticipated results of this research will be practical solutions for the involved parties in social media, such as firms, users and customers, and platform developers.