Abstract
Background: Marketers are interested in taking advantage of the capabilities of social media-based brand communities to develop long-term relationships with their customers. This research investigated the usage of a South African Facebook page to understand user attitudes and attendant pressures on users related to social norms and user loyalty.Objectives: The research investigated the extent to which perceived value, service quality and social factors influenced the customer’s intention to continue using a global motor vehicle firm’s social media-based online brand community (OBC).Method: We used an online voluntary survey to collect data from social media-based brand community members. In total, 303 responses were collected over a period of 4 weeks from a population of 3100 members. We analysed the relationship between trust, perceived responsiveness, perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, social norms and the members’ intention to continue using the firm’s OBC. 293 usable observations were subjected to descriptive, correlation and regression analysis.Results: The age of the respondents varied from 18 to 58 years with a mean age of 32 years. Of these, 60% were men and 40% women. About 86.7% of the respondents reported having at least some form of tertiary education. The results of the multiple regression analysis indicate that service quality factors such as trust (25.5%) and social influence factors such as social norms (12.5%) explain a greater part of the variance in OBC continuance intention compared with utility factors such as perceived usefulness (18.2%). The effects for responsiveness and ease of use were not statistically significant.Conclusion: Social media-based brand communities are playing an important role in enhancing the overall trust relationship, value offering, sociality, knowledge and information sharing between customers and firms. Practitioners should note that the loyalty of customers using a firm’s social media-based brand community is still associated with customers’ historical trust in the branded goods or services, and real-world relationships with the firm and brand community members.
Highlights
The popularity of social media platforms provides firms with the opportunity to build social media-based brand communities (McAlexander, Schouten & Koenig 2010)
Our study provides evidence that theory of reasoned action (TRA) is appropriate to measure different cognitive dimensions that users evaluate when deciding whether to continue using a social mediabased online brand communities (OBCs)
Data collected from a field survey of 293 social media users of a motor manufacturer’s OBC provided partial empirical support for the proposed model
Summary
The popularity of social media platforms provides firms with the opportunity to build social media-based brand communities (McAlexander, Schouten & Koenig 2010). Brand communities provide the firm with access to relationships with customers who admire their brand (Muniz & O’Guinn 2001). Traditional brand communities such as ‘brand fests’ can be beneficial because firms are able to learn about customer perceptions of new product offerings and the possible outcomes of competitive tactics, attract and collaborate closely with loyal customers, influence customer evaluations and actions, disseminate knowledge and establish a ‘holy grail’ of loyal customers (Laroche, Habibi & Richard 2013; McAlexander et al 2010). Recent innovations in social media-based brand communities provide firms with benefits such as wider customer reach, lower costs and greater communication efficacy (Laroche et al 2012). This research investigated the usage of a South African Facebook page to understand user attitudes and attendant pressures on users related to social norms and user loyalty
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