The time-varying effectiveness of customer engagement in social media

Abstract

This paper investigates the time-varying effect of customer engagement behaviour on brand performance in a social media context. Over 350,000 comments were retrieved from car brand owned Facebook pages for over 66 months. Customer engagement in social media (Facebook) was measured using composite valence volume metric, with valence estimated through lexicon-based sentiment analysis. The brand performance was gauged through unit sales of the car brand. Change-point analysis identified time variation through shifts in brand life cycle stages. Time-series analysis assessed lead-lag effects of customer engagement on brand performance. The customer engagement in social media brand community leads brand performance during all brand life cycle stages, except the decline stage. The results are consistent with the theory of interpersonal influence, which postulates persuasive engagement is dominant until maturity stage. The work contributes to the fast-growing customer engagement literature by investigating the dynamic customer engagement - brand performance relationship in a Facebook brand community context.