Article Preview
Top1. Introduction
The advent of social networking sites (SNS) not only changes the interaction mode between consumers and brands but also provides new ways for potential consumers to engage (Demmers et al., 2020). Whether it is Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, the development of these SNS has shown an exponential growth trend, which also virtually deepens people’s understanding of engagement. With the help of SNS, an efficient and close electronic connection can be established between personal choice and brand (Noë et al., 2016). As Malhotra et al. (2013) point out, “SNS has become a key channel for brand promotion, which can improve the consumer engagement on the one hand, and also significantly enhance the brand’s popularity in the market on the other hand.” The number of liking, sharing, or commenting is a powerful indicator of consumer engagement on SNS (Malhotra et al., 2013; Chauhan and Pillai, 2013; Doorn et al., 2010; Gummerus et al., 2012). As SNS provide opportunities and platforms for a considerable number of enterprises and marketers to attract customers, it also arouses researchers’ interest in related topics, such as customer engagement on SNS (Rabbanee et al., 2020).
Research on the antecedents of engagement on SNS in recent years has opened avenues (Dessart, 2017). To a certain extent, the reason why SNS is so popular is that consumers can communicate with the surrounding environment and show themselves on SNS (Leckie et al., 2016). Sprott et al. (2009) held that the reason why customer’s self-concept can play important roles in engagement is that consumers are more willing to regard brand as a component of their self-cognition. On SNS, many consumers who often interact with brands say that they “like” these brands in order to build up the online self-expression (Wallace et al., 2014). In conclusion, it is clear that consumers’ participation in brand is different, which is intimately connected with their views on the role of brand self-expression (Ruane and Wallace, 2015). Although this study has made some progress, the knowledge is still very scarce, especially when it comes to the influence of others, because SNS members can not only strengthen the ability of self-expression and presentation through the network (Ruane and Wallace, 2013; Wilcox and Stephen, 2013), but also carry out online real-time interaction with others and carry out larger scale social activities (Dennis et al., 2010).
Moreover, Putnam (1995) thinks that consumers’ need for emotional connection will stimulate their interest in engaging in community activities, which shows that it will affect consumers’ engagement. According to Dessart et al. (2015), many consumers want to take the opportunity to establish emotional connection with their favorite brands. That is, consumers may have emotional attachment to the brands in the interactive process, while brand attachment formed on SNS has not attracted the attention of many scholars (Wang et al, 2016). At this stage, brand attachment and customer engagement are basically independent research and analysis (Hinson et al., 2018), Considering that there are few existing researches on this aspect, it’s necessary to deeply analyze the mediating effects of brand attachment in social media engagement (Rabbanee et al., 2020).