Enhancing Customer Engagement on the Companies' Facebook Pages in the Fuel Retail Sector

Abstract

Social networks change the way how companies conduct their marketing activities. Potential customers become part of companies' marketing activities instead of just being passive participants. The ability to actively involve customers thus becomes a critical factor in the success of marketing activities. The study aims to determine how the posts' different content on the companies' Facebook pages affects the engagement of the message recipients. A retrospective, longitudinal study approach was used. Five hundred fifty-three posts from the four Slovak largest fuel retail sellers' Facebook pages were analyzed. The results revealed the significant difference in the medians of the passive engagement (χ2 (3, N = 533) = 85.685, p-value = < 0.0001) and active engagement (χ2 (3, N = 533) = 85.685, p-value = < 0.0001) according to different content types. The paired rank differences suggest that while entertainment messages (EM) significantly encourage both types of engagement (passive and active), informational messages (IM) and social messages (SM) encourage mainly passive engagement. The study extends the research on active and passive customer engagement, and thus, it contributes directly to understanding engagement and customer experience with social media and expands the knowledge about the Facebook content strategy. Finally, it offers recommendations for future research in the examined area.