The consequences of consumer engagement in social networking sites

Consumer engagement is increasingly becoming one of the important issues in the competitive business environment. Both researches and practitioners are focusing on how consumer engagement can be enhanced through different channels. The emergence of social networks has significantly caused a shift in consumer behaviors and brand relationships. With its unique features and structure, Social Networking Sites (SNS) offer an upper advantage to build consumer brand relationships and instant consumer engagement. Although researchers and practitioners are giving so much importance to consumer engagement, there is still a need to understand how engagement affects consumer behavior. Therefore, this study set out to determine the consequences of consumer engagement in SNS. It further viewed consumer engagement as a multi-dimensional concept comprising behavioral, cognitive and emotional dimensions and as such the hypotheses were aimed at determining how each of the three dimensions of consumer engagement affect the individual consequences of consumer engagement such as brand loyalty, satisfaction, commitment and trust in SNS. The study used a quantitative research design and developed a model that was based on the hypotheses developed vi for the study. It used a questionnaire survey to collect data from Anadolu University students in summer school. Facebook is chosen as a case for this study. 400 questionnaires were collected and the analyses were conducted with the 387 valid questionnaire. The research data was analyzed by SPSS program 20.0 version. The results suggest that emotional and behavioral consumer engagement dimensions were significant predictors for brand loyalty; emotional consumer engagement for satisfaction, cognitive and behavioral consumer engagement for commitment, while behavioral and emotional engagement dimensions were found to be significant predictors for trust. In sum, the study suggests brand loyalty, satisfaction, commitment, and trust to be possible consequences of consumer engagement in an online platform such as Facebook in our case. Keywords: Consumer Engagement, Social Networking Sites, Loyalty, Trust, Satisfaction, and Commitment.