Hamraz Tavallaee; Mina Ranjbarfard; Soheila Mehmannavazan
Abstract
Considering today's world, which is the age of information and communication, the role of social media in transmitting information and expanding all kinds of communication in people's daily and personal life cannot be ignored. Also, businesses of all sizes need social media to expand and strengthen ...
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Considering today's world, which is the age of information and communication, the role of social media in transmitting information and expanding all kinds of communication in people's daily and personal life cannot be ignored. Also, businesses of all sizes need social media to expand and strengthen their relationship with customers. The most important and main element of a social media is its content. In order to attract users, companies must produce content, and most importantly, produce content that engages the user. Research has shown that the contents created by the users themselves are more effective in arousing the emotions of other customers for participation and interaction than the contents created by the organization itself. Therefore, in order for users to have more participation, it is necessary to identify the content features that cause more engagement of the customer, followed by participation and interaction.
In previous researches, the features that a content should have in order to cause user engagement have been mentioned, but by studying all kinds of articles in this topic, the variable that has not been addressed is "emotion". Therefore, it was considered necessary to consider the role of emotion as a mediating variable. In fact, the customer's or user's emotion plays a fundamental and fundamental role in his engagement with the content, so in this research, an attempt has been made to investigate the effect of content features on content engagement (customer engagement) with the role of emotion as a mediator in the social media platform (Instagram).
The community studied in this research was the users of an Instagram page with the topic of cosmology and astronomy in Tehran, which earns money through advertising. The target population was 795,000. Due to the fact that the number of community members (that is, the number of followers of the investigated brand's Instagram page) was more than 795 thousand people, therefore, the number of samples based on the unlimited community was determined to be 384 people (190 women and 194 men). The sampling method is based on simple random sampling. Library resources were used to define the research problem and develop hypotheses. A questionnaire was used to measure the variables of content features and emotion.Variable questions of content features that had three dimensions of originality (questions 1-5), hedonism (questions 6-9) and quality (questions 10-12) were taken from the articles of Moldovan et al., Nambisan et al. , Huong Duong et al. was obtained. The emotion variable, which has three dimensions of pleasure (questions 13-16), arousal (questions 17-18) and mastery (questions 19-23), was taken from the article by Mazaheri et al. Likes and comments were used to measure the variable of content engagement. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to validate the measurement tool and path analysis method was used to test the hypotheses. PLS software was used for structural equation technique.
The results showed that the content features that include the three dimensions of originality, hedonism and quality have an effect on content engagement that includes likes and comments. Also, the results showed that all three dimensions of originality, hedonism and quality have an effect on emotion. The effect of the emotion variable, which includes the three dimensions of pleasure, arousal and mastery, was also confirmed on content engagement.
According to the results of this research, it can be easily seen that companies or brands need to pay attention to the social media platform that is included in the research in order to succeed in their business. In fact, organizations should be able to produce useful, entertaining and enjoyable content to engage their customers more with their brand and make them more loyal. Instagram pages should have high visual appeal, have meaningful videos and photos related to the content of the page, and the customer will find out that the content of the page is valuable and of high quality. In this research, it has been said in detail about the types of content features and their effect on customer engagement on Instagram. The limitation of this research can be mentioned that this study was conducted on the Instagram social network, therefore the content features and user engagement are specific to this platform and its results cannot be generalized to other social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.
