The Impact of Social Media Pages on Customer Equity and Purchase Intention; An Empirical Study of Mobile Operators

Abstract

The competitive conditions of the market, the desire to reach the target group directly, and the increasing interest of the consumers to the social media today make the use of social media inevitable. This study set out to identify attributes of marketing communication activities via social media pages of mobile operators in Turkey and examine the relationships among customer equity components (value equity, relationship equity, brand equity) and purchase intention through a structural equation modelling. According to results of the study marketing communication via social media pages has been found to be effective in all components of the customer equity, but value equity does not have a significant effect on purchase intention and there was no relationship between marketing communication via social media pages and purchase intention. The findings of this study can provide an overview of the relationship between social media and customer equity and enable mobile operators to forecast the future purchase intention of their customers more accurately, and it may also provide a guide to managing marketing activities especially on social media as well.