Building brand loyalty in social commerce: The case of brand microblogs

• We examine brand loyalty building on companies’ brand pages in social commerce.
• We propose that brand loyalty is primarily determined by relationship quality.
• Three types of factors are proposed as the key antecedents of relationship quality.
• Among the antecedents, self-congruence demonstrates the strongest influence.

Social commerce enables companies to promote their brands and products on online social platforms. Companies can, for instance, create brand pages on social networking sites to develop consumer–brand relationships. In such circumstances, how to build consumers’ brand loyalty becomes a critical concern. To address this, we draw upon the relationship quality perspective to suggest that brand loyalty is primarily determined by relationship quality, which is further influenced by self-congruence (i.e., the self factor), social norms (i.e., the social factor), information quality and interactivity (i.e., characteristics of brand pages). To test our model, we conduct an empirical survey on companies’ brand microblogs. We find that all proposed hypotheses are supported. Interestingly, the self factor rather than other factors was found to have the strongest impact in the model. In addition to its noteworthy implications for practitioners, we believe that this study provides important theoretical insights into understanding how to build brand loyalty in social commerce.