Engaging customers through online participation in social networking sites

Social networking is currently the most popular online activity among consumers worldwide. Today in business context, Social media is achieving increasing importance as a channel for consumer's online participation and engagement. Brands are developing its presence in social networking sites to meet engagement, brand awareness and word of mouth. In this context, the analysis of the factors that are conditioning consumer interaction with branded content becomes a matter of interest. To explore factors influencing consumer's online engagement in social networking sites (SNS), this study applies use and gratification (U&G) theory to explain why people are actively involved in media usage and interact highly with the communication media i.e., SNS. This study used an online as well as offline questionnaire to conduct empirical research, and collected and analyzed data of 394 samples by structural equation modeling (SEM) approach. The findings show that the U&G theory significantly explains consumers' attitude toward social networking ad (SNA). The result shows that the content characteristics of SNA i.e., vividness, interactivity, entertainment and information have direct influence on the consumers' online participation and engagement behavior whereas incentive doesn't show any impact. On the other hand, when mediated by consumer's positive attitude toward SNA, vividness, interactivity, information and entertainment show partial mediation effect on the consumers' online participation and engagement behavior whereas incentive show full mediation effect. In addition, this study found that the social media users who have a positive attitude toward SNA are more likely to surf the Net and feel more engaged. This study empirically contributes to the existing literature on the management of marketing strategies for consumer engagement in social networking sites.