Social messengers as the new frontier of organization-public engagement: A WeChat study

Mobile-based social messengers have overtaken social networking sites as the new frontier for organizations to engage online stakeholders. This study provides one of the earliest empirical investigations on the antecedents and relational outcomes of pubic engagement with companies via WeChat-one of the world's most popular social messaging apps. Publics' social messenger dependency and privacy perception of the medium are found to effectively drive public engagement, which in turn enhances organization-public relationships. Strategic guidelines based on the study findings are provided.