Enhancing customer engagement with emoji’s within social media brand posts The effect of expressive moves emoji’s on customer engagement via positive affect and perceived extraversion

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2021-08-31
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en
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Over the years, emoji use became popular in the social media context, where leveraging social media communication for brands is a resulting issue. Several scholars studied the effects of emoji use and provided different frameworks, especially for the effect on customer engagement for organizations. This research aimed to investigate the effects of emoji as a function on customer engagement by studying two explanatory routes. On the one hand, the emotional route has been studied by investigating the effect of emoji’s on customer engagement via positive affect. On the other hand, the associative route has been researched by studying the effect of emoji’s on customer engagement via perceived extraversion. The study focussed on emoji’s as expressive moves, which are used to express emotions and feelings. The goal of this research was to investigate the effect of expressive moves emoji’s on customer engagement by comparing the relative strength of both routes, to answer the research question: “What is the effect of the emoji type ‘expressive moves’ in social media brand posts on customer engagement via positive affect and perceived extraversion?”. A scenario-based experiment in the form of a survey has been created to answer the research question. The results showed that the emoji type ‘expressive moves’ has an indirect effect on customer engagement. Specifically, emoji’s have a positive effect on perceived extraversion, perceived extraversion has a positive effect on positive affect and positive affect affects customer engagement. The findings in this research provide theoretical and practical implications on how emoji’s can affect customer engagement, hereby improving brand communication strategies.
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Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen
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