Understanding consumer engagement in social media: The role of product lifecycle

Abstract

More than 4 billion unique users are now using different social media platforms. This provides firms with a new avenue to connect and converse with their targeted customers in a dialogue fashion and create better customer engagement. Although customer engagement has been studied, no study to date has focused on the concept of customer engagement in social media through the lens of users' participation in (co)creation of content on social media. To that end, this study strives to conceptualize and validate the concept of customer engagement with a social media post, proposing a research model which investigates the effects of popularity, discourse logic and argument frame on customer engagement with a social media post. This study also investigates to what extent those effects vary by the product lifecycle stage and social media platform type, using secondary data extracted from Instagram and Twitter on a group of products (i.e., vehicles) at different lifecycle stages to address its research objective. This study's findings would help firms make better decisions on enhancing their customer engagement on social media platforms.