Instagram vs TikTok: Which Engage Best for Consumer Brand Engagement for Social Commerce and Purchase Intention?

Abstract

Restrictions from the government during the Covid-19 pandemic have made people spend more of their time online, browsing social media and encouraging them to shop online to fulfill their needs. The two social media with the most number of users are Instagram and TikTok. This popularity makes consumers interact more actively with other people on social media, which can increase product evaluation and make better purchasing decisions through product comments and reviews. This factor marks the beginning of the "social commerce" phenomenon. The purpose of this research is to compare the two social commerce, Instagram and TikTok, which platform engage best for consumer brand engagement and purchase intention, and how they relate to each other.This research uses a quantitative method with a SEM-based Partial Least Square (PLS) model using the Smart PLS 4 application. The result of this research are as follows, the selection of social media network platforms does not have a significant effect on consumer brand engagement and social commerce purchase intention. Instead, social commerce purchase intention is significantly influenced by the engagement between users. In turn, this consumer brand engagement is affected by the users’ habits when using social media.