The era of Instagram expansion: matching social media marketing activities and brand loyalty through customer relationship quality

Abstract

ABSTRACT The social media revolution has massively transformed marketing plans and practices in the business world. Moreover, marketers can reinforce customer–brand relationships through companies’ social media marketing (SMM) plans and gain a clear understanding of the consumer perspective more quickly than ever before. Using the stimulus–organism–response (SOR) framework, this study developed a model to examine how SMM activities (SMMAs) affect dimensions of customer relationship quality (CRQ) – that is, commitment, trust, and satisfaction – and brand loyalty (BL). This study, which investigated the dimensions of CRQ as mediation effects between SMMAs and BL to telecommunications brands on Instagram, adopted structural equation modeling and obtained data from a sample of 290 Instagram users in Palestine who are telecommunications customers. The findings show that SMMAs positively affect the dimensions of CRQ and that SMMAs are a stronger predictor of commitment than trust and satisfaction. Additionally, SMMAs had a positive effect on BL. The results confirmed the significant effect of three components of CRQ on BL building. The results also revealed that dimensions of CRQ act as mediators between SMMAs and BL. The study contributes to the literature by examining the underlying mechanism of how SMMAs promote dimensions of CRQ and BL in the service industry.