The relationships between social media brand engagement, brand interaction benefit, and brand trust

Customer engagement (Ce) concept, has taken a place on research agenda of academicians and practitioners intersted in customer behavior in recent years, although being a complex phenomenon, it represents a research domain that has already been called for special issues for SSCI's (Social Sciences Citation Index) some of the leading marketing journals. Notwithstanding that engagement notion is already indicating a contemporary marketing problematic to realize the operability of construct and underlying mechanisms for brand managers and social media proffessionals under the online brand community context. The aim of this doctoral dissertation, is to examine the relationships in between perceived brand interaction benefit, brand trust and social media brand engagement within the frame of Uses & Gratification Theory (U&G; Katz et al., 1973; 1974) and Social Exchange Theory (Blau, 1964; Emerson, 1976) in the context of social media based brand communities (SMBBC's) with using structural equation modelling. In this regard, within the scope of doctoral dissertation current literature about customer engagement, online brand communites, social media based brand communities and social networking sites (e.g. Facebook, and Instagram) has addressed in detail and advanced. According to global user statistics among top social networking sites Facebook and Instagram's official brand accounts related to product and services settled as a research context and 815 usable data obtained from young adult consumers (18-24) along with result of the field survey confirms the established relations on research model. In this regard, users perceived brand interaction benefit causes social media based brand engagement and engagement has positive and significant effect on brand trust.