Social media engagement behaviour: a uses and gratifications perspective

The proliferation of social media platforms and corresponding consumer adoption in recent years has precipitated a paradigm shift, significantly altering the ways customers engage with brands. Organisations recognise the social and network value of engagement within social media, and practitioners are endeavouring to build engagement through their social media content. However, theoretically based academic guidance concerning marketing practice and engagement in new media social networks is limited. This article provides a theoretical model to explicate the role of social media content in facilitating engagement behaviour within a social media context. Based on uses and gratifications theory, it provides a model for how an organisation can stimulate positively valenced engagement behaviour through social media and dissuade negatively valenced engagement behaviour in this forum. A typology of social media engagement behaviour is proposed and a series of hypotheses exploring the relationships between social media content and engagement behaviour are presented.