How social media advertising features influence consumption and sharing intentions: the mediation of customer engagement

Abstract

PurposeSocial media advertising (SMA) has become overly critical in the interactive marketing research field. This paper aimed to construct a research architecture model and to investigate the mediating effect of customer engagement between SMA and consumer behavioral intention in the context of Macao's casino integrated resorts.Design/methodology/approachThe authors collected data from 300 Chinese-speaking visitors of Macao's casino integrated resorts through a face-to-face survey. The hypotheses derived from the conceptual model were tested through two-stage structural equation modeling. The authors considered age and gender as control variables.FindingsThis study found that entertainment and promotional rewards had significant direct effects on consumption intention. Social media dependency did affect directly not only consumption intention but also sharing intention. Customer engagement on SMA mediated the effects of two SMA features (entertainment and promotional rewards) and one feature of SMA viewers (social media dependency) on consumption intention. As to extraneous variables, neither age nor gender significantly influenced consumer behavioral intention.Practical implicationsThe casino integrated resort managers should enhance the entertainment elements and provide reasonable promotional rewards to increase SMA's effectiveness. Managers should also consider the social media usage habits of the targeted customers. Further academic research on casino integrated resorts in other regions may use this study as a basis for investigating the mediation of customer engagement on SMA.Originality/valueThis study contributed to understanding the mediating mechanism of customer engagement on SMA by conceptualizing customer engagement on SMA as a unique idea and provided a conceptual framework for further theoretical and empirical research in the interactive marketing research field.

How customers respond to social media advertising

“…Wang, 2006;Jayasinghe and Ritson, 2012), the existing studies have been mostly conceptual rather than empirical (Kim et al, 2017). Recently, Ji et al (2022) and Bui et al (2022) investigated the antecedents and consequences of customer engagement with SMA. However, there is still a lack of research that investigates customers' engagement with and responses to SMA from the perspective of customers' perceived value of advertising (Gavilanes et al, 2018;Florenthal, 2019).…”

“…Additionally, Van Doorn et al (2010) argued that customer engagement is driven by incentive factors and affects consumers' purchasing behaviours. Furthermore, Ji et al (2022) found that customer engagement mediates the impact of promotional rewards and entertainment on consumption intention. Based on existing literature, it is reasonable to speculate that the value of SMA induces advertisers to engage with it to elicit customer responses.…”

“…In sum, more effective and attractive social media ads have more influence on customers' attitudes and consumption intentions. If they do not, the value of firms' SMA investment will be considerably diminished (Dolan et al, 2019;Ji et al, 2022).…”

Examining social media live stream’s influence on the consumer decision-making: a thematic analysis

“…The second factor of intention is two pronged: intention to purchase and intention to engage with the community, often by sharing consumption experience or interacting with the content shared by other users. Intention in both prongs is thereby shaped by engagement [ 105 ]. Decision, a named stage in the consumer decision-making process, also covers two aspects: the decision to purchase and decision to publicly review or share experience.…”

How social media's cause-related marketing activity enhances consumer citizenship behavior: the mediating role of community identification

“…In other words, purchase behavior is a kind of helping behavior realized through purchases within the virtual community, while recommendation behavior is a kind of word-of-mouth behavior extending outside the virtual community. Consistent with Ji et al (2021), who use consumption intention and sharing intention to measure the consequences of consumer engagement in social media marketing. Thus, we used purchase intention and recommendation intention to operationalize consumer citizenship behavior (either as in-role or extra-role behavior) that have been widely adopted by previous studies (e.g.…”