Enabling Analysis of User Engagements Across Multiple Online Communication Channels

Abstract

The role of online communication channels, especially social media, has been developed from a platform for sharing information to a platform for influencing audiences. With the intention to reach the widest audience possible, organizations tend to distribute their marketing information to as many communication channels as possible. After that, they measure the performance of their marketing activities on every channel, where the typical measurement on how users perceived information is through engagement indicators. Measuring engagements across channels is challenging because the heterogeneity of engagement mechanism that can be performed by users on every channel. In this paper, we introduce a method to enable an analysis of those heterogeneous engagements which are distributed on multiple online communication channels. The solution consists of a conceptual model to uniformly representing user engagements on every channel. The model enables user engagements integration across channels, such that a more advanced user engagements analysis can be performed. We show how to apply our solution to analyze wide variety user engagements on popular social media channels from the tourism industry. This work brings us a step closer to realize an integrated multi-channel online communication solution.