Users' engagement on Facebook: a cluster analysis

Abstract

Social media platforms have shown dramatic growth in the past few years. Social media presents a wealth of marketing opportunities for companies. Companies can use these platforms to do tailored marketing, to build more effective customer relationship management programs and to engage their customers, just to name a few. Understanding social media users' characteristics and behaviour on social media is critical. This paper delineates an exploratory study to understand users' engagement on social media by attempting to segment and classify Facebook users, being the most popular social media platform, segmenting Facebook users will be based on users' motives to log on to Facebook, usage patterns, lifestyle, attitudes towards Facebook and demographic variables. A sample of 290 users was drawn from the Facebook users in Egypt. Data was analysed using two stages cluster analysis technique. Three different clusters were obtained namely; socialisers, laggards and information seekers, each with different characteristics and Facebook usage patterns. Socialisers and information seekers are the most frequent users of Facebook, while the laggards are the least frequent users of Facebook with an intention of discontinuation. This study provides useful marketing insights and implications to companies in developing their marketing strategies.