The Influence of Customers Social Media Brand Community Engagement on Restaurants Visit Intentions

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to study the relationships between brand community engagement of customers on social media networks and customer behavioral intentions with regard to visiting restaurants where the theory of planned behavior was applied. A conclusive-descriptive, cross-sectional research design was selected in order to determine the degree to which Brand Community Engagement, Attitude (ATT), Subjective Norms (SN), Perceived Behavioral Control (PBC), Restaurant’s Visit Intentions (INT) and Visit Behavior (B) are interrelated and associated. The results indicated that BCE does affect customers attitude towards dining out and visiting restaurants and that SN can’t moderate the strong relationship between ATT and intention. In addition, customer intention can weakly predict their behavior of visiting restaurants. The results of this study suggest that management of restaurants should pay attention to their marketing communication strategies through social media restaurant’s communities and should focus on how to increase the engagement levels of customers beside understanding and may be changing their attitudes towards experiences in restaurants. This study examined the relationship between Restaurants Brand Community Engagement on social media and customer intentions to dine out and visit restaurants.