Customer Engagement on Facebook

In its early days, the Internet was seen as an opportunity for marketers to communicate with consumers, and even to engage the customer in two-way communications. However, consumers are becoming overcome by marketers’ attempts to engage them in relationship marketing strategies. The marketing managers and planners should apply new ideas in order to make their brand community more effective because traditional web sites are no longer motivating customers to return and interact to the site.

So it is important for the marketer to find out the strategy that involves the development of a virtual community around the brand by focusing on perceived benefits such as social benefits, entertainment benefits and economic benefits to the customer by using online media and social network which are more powerful marketing tools in the current day. In addition, interactions among members can influence the selection of brands, making effective communities very important for the company.

In order to get a better understanding of the important factors of community engagement behaviour, this study will show which factor lead to successful online strategies for the marketing on Facebook fan page by using Product Moment Coefficient Pearson Correlation (Bivariate) to analyse the variables and explain that how social benefits, economic benefits and entertainment benefits have a relationship on customer community engagement behaviour. Acknowledgements To complete my individual research, I would like to thank you my advisor Assistant Professor Dr.

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Kriengsin Prasongsukarn for all helpful advices and guidance since the beginning up to the individual research completion. Moreover I have learned many things from him during the consulting time and he motivated me to try harder to understand and apply his teaching to real practice. I would like to thank to all of my friends, iMBA section 19 for their advice and encouragement which supported me to finish this individual research. Thank you to respondents of my questionnaires.

Lastly I would like to thank my family who always believe in me that I could do study and work at the same time. I hope this research will be benefits the business towards understanding ways to enhance customer engagement with their brands.

The reason to select the studying community engagement behaviors in a Facebook brand community of customers is because nowadays Facebook is a very famous social-networking website that has impacts on daily life and it socially influences the people’s choices. The world is moving toward the cyber world is which internet connections are easily access and reachable for every households and businesses.

This study will show how the customer community engagement behavior affects perceived benefits of the Facebook commercial brand, and user of its services and applications. We will focus on both male and female respondents who are Facebook users and fans of at last one brand on Facebook, because these people can respond to our questionnaire effectively as they already experience social-networking. The company is looking for ways to brand loyalty among customers as the brand community offers both companies and customers new ways to engage with each other.

While companies aim at engaging with influencing members’ perceptions, loyal customers about the brand, sharing information, and learning from and about customers (Algesheimer et al. , 2005), customers perceive value through the variety of practices that they execute offline and online (Schau et al. , 2009). Although originally, an online brand community referred to a community on the www, recently social media network has been added to companies’ marketing and brand building activities (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010).

Attracted by the great number of users of Facebook so, the creative marketing activity in Facebook brand community will draw people to participate and make the brand succeed. This study will help the firm understand more about customer engagement in the Facebook brand community.

Over the last years, the ways people search, share information and communicate with each other has changed dramatically (Hennig-Thurau et al. , 2010). Social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube are playing a major role and are more important in business communication.

The changes force the company and brand to focus on online services in order to create relationships to customers. Facebook allows companies several services to contact and communicate with their customers. Fan pages are a very interesting tool for companies to use. Usual characteristics of fans are self-identification as a fan, cultural competence, emotional engagement, co-production and auxiliary consumption (Kozinets et al. , 2010). The Internet brought the possibility to overcome geographical restrictions and also help the company build fan communities world-wide.

In practice, Facebook users can be fans of a fan page by pressing the “like-button,” then it identifies that they like this brand and will present their profiles on social network. The content and information of fan page is automatically posted to the customer is Facebook news feed, and the customer can post comments on the fan page, interact with the brand, forward offers from the page as well as the interact with other community members (Jahn and Kunz. ,2012).

As a social network, Facebook has affected the social life and activity of people in several ways. With its availability on many mobile devices, Facebook allows users to continuously stay in touch with friends, relatives and other connections wherever they are in the world, as long as there is access to the Internet. It can also tie people with same interests or beliefs through groups and other pages. This study will help the company to understand more how community engagement behavior in Facebook is important to the company for implementing the technique to create company brand perception and gain market share via Facebook.

In addition, engaging with the brand community in different behaviors, receive different relationship benefits, for example entertainment, may make customers more satisfied. This assumption is based on the reasoning that customers. This study will investigate how a customer engagement behavior affects consumers perceived benefits, and assume a positive relationship between the constructs. (Gummerus et al. , 2012)

The research objective is to study the affects of community engagement behaviour of Facebook commercial brand on perceived benefits.

The company can know more insight of customer behaviour especially the company who focuses on social network marketing activities. This study will help the company create marketing and content to their page on Facebook effectively to increase perceived benefit of the brand.

The research studied the affects of community engagement behaviour on three factors of perceived benefits. The three independent variables of perceived benefits factors are social benefit, entertainment benefit and economic benefit. The respondents of this research are male and female Facebook user in Bangkok. This research result would be advantage to the marketing department of the company who has community page of their brand on Facebook they can apply more attractive activities for their members.

This study will help them to monitor their Facebook fan page effectively after they understand the fact that the brand community will help a firm draws individual customers and to create relationships with those customers, and also establishing long-term relationships.

There are some limitations to this study of customer community engagement behaviours of commercial brands on Facebook. The study is limited to the engagement behaviour in a Facebook commercial brand community, while customers also engage with the brand in other ways.

The limitations that need to be considered are first, self-selection of respondents affects the results which may come from inactive community users. Second, the behavioural measures were reported by the respondents themselves, and do not know that the answers are from actual behaviour or not. Finally, because the findings are based on commercial brand on Facebook page and the respondent have to be both Facebook user and commercial brand community page so this will represent only some portion of target customer of the company not the whole market

The findings in this study have several implications for social media strategies, and help the company to understand why customers participate in the Facebook brand community which is important to increasing more numbers of Facebook users to become brand community members and towards develop marketing on Facebook, which is lower cost than other commercial media. Firms may want to encourage and reward consumers to become more active on the site to receive maximal perceived benefits from the community (Gummerus et al. 2012).

Fan pages the important tool on Facebook for brand communication. The company can use to integrate and interact with the customers effectively (Dholakia et al. , 2004). Community engagement behaviour is the customer behaviour that is more value than purchasing the product or service, and can be defined as a customer’s behavioural manifestations that have a focus as motivational drivers rather than purchasing by the brand or firm (van Doorn et al. , 2010).

Social benefits results from interaction among the company and consumer and mention to recognition and also friendship (Gweinner et al. , 1998). Entertainment benefits is the relaxation and fun which customer perceive and could encourage community participation (Dholakia et al. , 2004). Economic benefits refer to people joining brand communities in order to get discounts and time savings, or to take part in marketing activity campaign and competitions (Gwinner et al. , 1998).

Theoretical Literature Customer engagement in brand communities Customer engagement in brand communities causes the customer’s interactive experiences direct to the brand, is context-dependent, and develops consumers’ experience of brand value (Brodie et al. , 2011). Customer engagement is sometimes used to represent the highest form of loyalty (Bowden, 2009; Roberts and Alpert, 2010), but as behavioural indicator it comprises all kinds of behaviours, not only those that are characteristic of high degrees of loyalty (Libai, 2011; Narayandas, 1998).

The customer engagement consists of five dimensions. First, customer engagement can be defined in a different ways depending on customer time, interest or preference this called customer’s resources. Second, it can generate in different of outcomes for the customer such as improvement in the service. Third, it can be different in scope and be momentary, for example on going behaviour or issuing a complaint. Fourth, it has various impact on the company both negative and positive impact. Fifth, customer can engage in the behaviours for specific purposes (van Doorn et al. , 2010).

Consumers engage in a number of behaviours that tie their relationship with the brand. For example frequency of visit, buying behaviours, and intended behaviour which go beyond the traditional measure of the loyalty of the customer (Gummerus et al. , 2012). Perceived benefits of customer engagement in brand communities Before the existence of Web 2. 0, the customers did not consider social benefits important in an online context. They sought to experience trust benefit and special treatment benefit such as saving time and receiving special service rather than experience social benefit (Yen and Gwinner, 2003).

Research on brand communities found several different dimensions, including geographic concentration, social context, size, and temporality (Dholakia et al. , 2004; McAlexander et al. , 2002). Regarding the size, Dholakia et al. , (2004) found the differences between small group-based communities and big communities in terms of motivation to join the communities. Another dimension is their temporality in communities, some are unchanging and others are short-term.

The temporal stability of community members can be benefit to marketers as well as longevity associates with a long-term, stable market. Finally, geographically concentrated or scattered are considered as a dimension of communities (Hur at el. , 2011) The keys of brand community participation are hedonic and functional. Functional goals mention to information sharing among community members, while hedonic goals lead customer to have a positive experience over the interactions among the member (Holland and Baker, 2001).

Regardless of which aim is established before a participation, the effect of brand community on private lives has been growing, for example over actual product consumption and purchasing, or the formation of opinions toward products or brands (Hagel and Armstrong, 1997), since they have been changing the role performed by existing reference groups (Constant et al. , 1996). The firms have begun to use brand communities for the strategic purpose of getting closer to a specific target market segment.

Members of a brand community define the outline and particular community activities by the inter-relationships between members who like the same brand, and as they share information about the brand (Muniz and Schau, 2005), they set up brand-centered sub-culture (Schouten and McAlexander, 1995), which could be applied for companies’ brand-building strategies. Then, the interaction between brand communities and companies is helpful for the firms to analyse customers’ characteristics and needs more accurately, so that firms can achieve long-term customer relationships at a lower cost.

There are many researchers who studied about the customer engagement, brand community, social networking, social benefit, entertainment benefit and economic benefit.

From previous research two engagement behavioural factors were found, one being community behaviour and one being transactional behaviours as independent variables (Gummerus et al. , 2012).

The variable measuring how often customers visit the page and react to the brand on Facebook. Therefore, the three constructs were social benefits, economic and entertainment benefits as mediator. The dependent variables were relationship outcome, one is satisfaction and one is loyalty.

There are three independent variables which are social benefit, entertainment benefit and economic benefit. The dependent variable of this conceptual framework is community engagement behaviour.

The hypotheses studies the relationship between customer engagement behaviour which is community engagement behaviour about the brand community on Facebook and perceived benefit which are social benefit, economic benefit and entertainment benefit and demonstrate that there is positive relationship of customer community engagement behaviour on perceived benefit for Facebook users in Thailand. Customer engagement in brand communities

From previous studies, the researcher examined the customer behavioural engagement in a brand community relationship on perceived relationship benefits of Game Club in Facebook. For this study we will study a customer community engagement behaviour relationship on perceived relationship benefits of Facebook user in Thailand who are members of the commercial brand’s fan page. Perceived benefits of customer engagement in brand communities From previous studies, the researcher examined the relationship benefits mediation of customer engagement on satisfaction and loyalty of Game Club in Facebook.

For this study we will research the relationship of customer community engagement behaviour and perceived benefits which are social benefit, entertainment benefit and economic benefit of Facebook user in Thailand who is fan page of the commercial brand.

The Facebook user who is a member of the fan page of the brand on Facebook is defined as a target group to distribute the questionnaire in order to test the hypothesis. The questionnaires are available into two methods; one is online questionnaire and second is questionnaire paper. The respondent who answered the questionnaire of this study is all Thai Facebook users and also being a fan page of commercial brand on Facebook.

The questionnaire combined 4 constructs which are customer community engagement behaviour construct, social benefit construct, entertainment benefit construct and economic benefit construct and consists of 23 questions which this research applied the question from the previous study base on this research objectives.

This research was applied from the previous study of customer engagement on Facebook. The information was collected from 208 respondents who are Facebook users and members of a commercial brand fan page and were tested to prove the hypotheses.

The researcher collected data by distributed 58 questionnaires in Siam Square, Assumption University and Thai Summit Tower building in Bangkok, and posted a questionnaire online for Thai Facebook users and there is 150 respondents from online questionnaire. The date duration to collect the data is 24th February 2013 to 12th March 2013.

The instruments for gathering the data for the research are online questionnaire and paper questionnaire.

To test the hypothesis the question paper consists of varies specific questions to measure the relationship of community engagement behaviours on three perceived benefit, social benefit, economic benefit and entertainment benefit. The questionnaires consist of four constructs. The Community engagement behaviours the perceived benefit statement was measured on a Five-point Likert scale with the anchors “Strongly agree” – “Strongly disagree”.

In this research, there are three types of data analysis.

First, this study uses descriptive analysis to analyse the frequency and percentage of the data in screening question and demographic information. Second, this research use reliability analysis to test the reliability of each question for dependent and independent variables. Finally, this research use inferential analysis to analyse the correlation between variables by using Pearson correlation (Bivariate). Descriptive Analysis After screening question of the questionnaire from 208 respondents there are 200 respondents who are Facebook users and be a member of brand fan page and 8 respondents who are not Facebook user.

The following table shows the frequency and percentage of demographic by using descriptive analysis. Table 4. 2 Screening question Facebook user From table 4. 2 of 208 respondents, we found 200 respondents are Facebook users 96. 2% (200) and 3. 8% (8) are not Facebook user. Brand fan page on Facebook From table 4. 2, after the first screening question we got 200 respondents who are members of a brand fan page on Facebook. Frequency of visit fan page From the table 4. 2, the highest percentage of visits to brand fan page on Facebook of the respondents is 1-3 times per week and the lowest percentage is once a month or seldom.

There are 37. 5% (75) of respondents who visit 1-3 times per week, 29. 5% (59) of visit daily, 20% (40) of 4-6 times per week, 7% (14) of 2-3 times per month and 6% (12) of once a month or seldom. Table 4. 3 Demographic information Factor of Gender From the table 4. 2, the highest percentage of respondents was female. There are 56. 5% (113) of female respondents and 43. 5% (87) of male respondents. Factor of Age From the table 4. 2, the highest percentage of respondents was age 25-29 years old and the lowest percentage is age below 20 years old.

There are 69% (138) of age 25 to 29 years old, 16% (32) of age 21 to 24 years old, 12. 5% (25) of age 30 and above and 2. 5% (5) of age below 20 years old. Factor of education level From the table 4. 2, the highest percentage of respondents was college/university level and the lowest percentage is high school level. There are 66. 5% (133) of college/university level, 31. 5% (63) of advance degree level and 2% (4) of high school level.

There are 3 independent variables which are social benefit, entertainment benefit and social benefit to analyse the relationship with community engagement behaviour by using Coefficient Pearson Correlation (Bivariate).

There are three hypothesis of this research to test relationship between independent variables that are social benefit, entertainment benefit and economic benefit and dependent variable that is community engagement behaviour of a brand fan page on Facebook by using Product Moment Correlation Coefficient. The result from these hypothesis state that perceived benefit which are social benefit, entertainment benefit and economic benefit are important factor of customer engagement. All hypotheses are supported and positive related to customer engagement behaviour.

The findings in this study have practical implications for marketing practices. First of all, there is a positive relationship between community engagement behaviour and perceived benefit that are social benefit, entertainment benefit and economic benefit. The effectiveness of creating marketing on a Facebook fan page of the company can increase the customer engagement successfully. Second, the more customers interact to the brand on Facebook the more they perceive social benefit, entertainment benefit and conomic benefit.

This research found that social benefit has the strongest relationship toward community engagement behaviour. The customers are likely to interact with the brand because they like to exchange information and experience and community with people who has the same interest. Entertainment benefit is also has a relationship to the community engagement behaviour when the customer has high attention to the brand fan page on Facebook can be indicate that they perceive the entertainment benefit value.

There is a high customer engagement level when the entertainment benefits that the customers perceive are high. The study also found that the relationship of economic factor and customer engagement behaviour is positive so the interactive of customer toward the brand on Facebook is high when the customer perception of the economic factors is high. The important role of developing brand community on Facebook of the company should make every effort to actively manage social, economic and entertainment benefit respectively in order to engage the customer on online communities successfully.

A significant issue of great interest to the brand is how participants in online communities become associated with a brand over time. The building of online communities is supposed to be an effective means of marketing communication which create multiple benefits; for example, improving brand awareness and target marketing. The providing of social, economic and entertainment benefit to online communities will encourages community members to jointly engage to the company effectively.

As Facebook became a successful tool of the companies to promote the brand and create customer relationship online and widely broadcast as there is the largest number of user in social media network so, the companies should focused on creating their brand community on Facebook by developing the factors of social, economic and entertainment benefit in order to get customer attention and interaction toward the brand and go beyond the transaction then it can generate loyalty of the brand successfully.

For this study we focused on the customer community engagement behaviour of ommercial brand on Facebook for and as the brand communities in social media increases on customer behaviour towards multiple community sites so the next research we can study about the customers engagement behaviour towards other social media brand communities, and compare what are the important factors of customer who joins these communities. Moreover we can study the differences of customers’ point of view between the Facebook brand communities and other popular online brand communities such as Twitter, You Tube and Instagram to find out whether customers engage in both, or they prefer using one over the other social media network.

Finally, we can study customer’s engagement in different behaviours such as transactional behaviour and find out their expectations on the online communities.

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