Stimulating social Marketing consumer engagement within social media: An empirical study

This study investigates the factors that influence consumer online engagement for social marketing messages by looking at the role of personality, incentives, and message appeal. This study conducts an online experiment on Facebook to investigate the participants’ behavioural engagement in the study’s messages. The participants are randomly assigned to four Facebook group, being offered different incentives (i.e. monetary, non-monetary, social recognition, no incentive), and are exposed to two health messages, one framed with an informative appeal and the other with fear. We aim to investigate whether self-reported personality traits (Big Five) influence online engagement under study’s different condition. Overall the result shows that participants engage significantly higher in fear appeal regardless of their personality and incentive condition. Further analyses reveal that monetary rewards generate the greatest level of engagement, especially for individuals with high personality scores.