The Influence of Social Media Marketing on Customer Engagement with Special Reference to the Cosmetic Industry in Central Province

Abstract

The evolution from the static web environment to the interactive and dynamic web environment has opened up new platforms, transforming the ways in which businesses carry out business activities in the modern world. In this context, web-based technology plays a pivotal role and has a wider scope in the domain of marketing and brand building. Accordingly, social media has been identified as one of the significant contributors in brand building. This research aims to identify the impact of social media marketing on customer engagement with special reference to the cosmetic industry in Central Province. The main objective of the study is to investigate the factors that are affecting social media marketing on customer engagement. The study conducted with a quantitative study approach and the survey strategy utilized for the study. The abstract concept of the study was defined and measured based on the comprehensive review of literature. In collecting the primary data for the study, a self-administrated questionnaire was given to one hundred social media users from Kandy, Matale & Nuwara-Eliya districts using simple random sampling as a probability sampling method. At the data analysis phase, descriptive statistics and inferential statistics were evaluated. Data were analyzed using the correlation and regression analysis. The independent variable consists of 5 dimensions namely, social planning, social influence, social community, social results and social attitudes. The study also emphasizes the significance of “social attitudes” as a major factor in intimate relationships among persons, as it strengthens the brand-consumer relationship online, and in turn will ultimately impact customer engagement. Moreover, the findings of the study reveal that social planning is the main factor affecting customer engagement whereas social attitudes and social results too have a considerable moderate impact on customer engagement. Social media which is an interactive digital technology that assist in creating and sharing of information, ideas etc through virtual communities and networks, plays a vital role in social planning, social attitudes and social results. Hence, marketers and social media administrators need to be more cautious about what they post online as this is more likely to influence customers. Especially they need to pay more attention to firm-created content and user-generated content for a successful social media marketing campaign.