Brand followers: Consumer motivation and attitude towards brand communications on Twitter

Reference: Sook Kwon, S., Kim, E., Sung, Y., & Yun Yoo, C. (2014). Brand followers: Consumer motivation and attitude towards brand communications on Twitter. International Journal of Advertising, 33(4), 657-680

Summary:

Nowadays, with the rise of social media and social networking sites and applications, there is an importance of building and sustaining relationships with the customers, and is possible with the existence of social networking sites, such as Facebook and Twitter. It is now an advantage for brands to be present on social networking sites, and in this article the focus goes for one particular social networking site, Twitter. Twitter combines the social network sites, blogging, and text messaging, with the ability to follow brands, family, friends, companies, celebrities. People can also unfollow, recommend things or places, tweet about what are their thoughts of the day, re-tweet what others might have said and could also just be passive users and not contribute to any of the above mentioned. With more than 2oo million active users tweeting 400 million messages a day, nearly 90% of those users are brand followers on Twitter. This study revolves around twitter and it tries to identify the reason behind consumer’s motivation to follow brands on Twitter since consumer’s attitudes are always changing it is essential to keep up with their attitudes in order to have a relationship and sustain it. So the two main objectives behind this article are “identify and explore consumer motivation for following brands on Twitter, and determine how and which consumer motivation and attitudinal factors may affect the effectiveness of social media marketing on Twitter.

A survey of 400 brand followers on Twitter with an aim for this study to provide a baseline understanding of both motivation and relationship between identified motivations and key consumer-brand relationship variables including: “brand identification, brand community commitment, relationship continuance intention and brand recommendation intentions.” Moreover, what was found concerning the reasons behind people’s motivation to following a certain brand are four main reasons which are, incentive seeking, social-interaction seeking, brand usage/ likability, and information seeking. The latter three reasons were found to be significant predictors of the consumer-brand relationship variables.