Customer engagement behaviours in social media: capturing innovation opportunities

Abstract

Purpose Social media brand pages have become instrumental in enabling customers to voluntarily participate in providing feedback/ideas for improvement and collaboration with others that contribute to the innovation effort of brands. However, research on mechanisms which harness these specific customer engagement behaviours (CEB) in branded social media platforms is limited. Based on the stimulus–organism–response paradigm, this study investigates how specific online-service design characteristics in social media brand pages induce customer-perceived value perceptions, which in turn, stimulate feedback and collaboration intentions with customers. Design/methodology/approach Data collected from 654 US consumers of brand pages on Facebook were used to empirically test the proposed framework via structural equation modelling. Findings The theoretical framework found support for most hypothesized relationships showing how online-service design characteristics induce an identified set of customer value perceptions that influence customer feedback and collaboration intentions. Research limitations/implications The sample is restricted to customer evaluations of brand pages on Facebook in the USA. Practitioners are advised to maximize online-service design characteristics of content quality, brand page interactivity, sociability and customer contact quality as stimulants that induce brand learning value, entitativity value and hedonic value. This then translates to customer feedback and collaboration intentions towards the brand page. Originality/value The findings have important implications for the design and optimization of online services in the customer engagement-innovation interface to harness CEBs for innovation performance.