Customer Engagement Factors in Facebook Brand Pages

India is relatively new in adopting social media and this paper try to identify the factors influencing customer engagement in Facebook brand pages. The main source of data used in this article is from Facebook’s insight data. The 134 selected Facebook Brand Pages were monitored regarding both the brand’s activity (posts) as well as the consumers’ interactions with the brand’s activity (likes, comments, etc.). The Fanpage Karma, a social-media monitoring tool was used to collect the data. A conceptual framework is provided that helps to understand the factors influencing the consumer engagement in Facebook brand pages. This paper proposes an empirical model based on Indian Facebook brand pages, which can help in increasing the brand engagement in Facebook brand pages.


Introduction
Customer engagement (CE) in the marketing literature is a new phenomenon, which has recently received considerable attention. Customer engagement in social media has become a particularly important topic as the abundance of social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. as well as a vast number of customer support forums and online communities provide many opportunities to reach consumers to make companies more noticeable and interact with customers. Customer engagement is defined as "a customer's behavioral manifestation toward a brand or firm" (Van Doorn et al., 2010). Brodie et al. (2011) proposes that engaged customers have a key role in enhanced business performance by providing word-of mouth (WOM) about the products, services and brands.
Consumer engagement has been one of the most widely discussed topics in the social media research (Menezes, 2013). Facebook brand page activity may potentially influence engagement. Brand can post an item of content on its page, and reach is the number of people who receive an impression of a piece of content. Interactions are when a user likes, comments on or shares the content. Reach depends on several factors, like number of fans, number of interactions and number of friends that fans of a brand page have. Brands have to provide content that fit needs of the customer, in order to engage the customer, by clicking the like button or responding to the brand's message. Facebook activity is related to number of posts and what kind of content is been posted.
networking platform like Facebook to create valuable brands by providing an overview on the types of activities the brands undertake, the types of interactions and the implications this has on brands.

Brand Community on Facebook
A brand community is a group consists of individuals who are specialized, non-geographically bound community based on a structured set of social relationships among admirers of a brand (Muniz & O'Guinn, 2001). A brand community allows followers to share information about the brand to others. Brand communities facilitate interactions through exchange of opinions about the brand or a particular product among consumers, thus engaging their members in a form of word of mouth communication (McAlexander et al., 2002). Further, a brand can become an informational resource for the members of the community and provide customer service. Creating a strong brand community is a key step in developing a strong relationship marketing strategy.
Facebook's emergence as an important marketing channel due to brand pages as they establish direct communication with their fans and customers. Due to popularity of social media websites, several companies are using social networking sites to support the creation of brand communities (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010;Muniz & O'Guinn, 2001). Facebook fan pages allow a brand to create an online community of brand users through the social networking site. Communities in Facebook are formed around Facebook Pages and Facebook Groups. The people who "like" the page (who pressed the Like button on the page) become fans. When a user clicks the like button, a link to this Page will appear on the user's timeline. There are six types of posts to choose from on Facebook page: video, photo, Link, Question, Event and Text (Olczak & Sobczyk, 2013). Photos along with questions create lot interactions and drive engagement among fans. Brand community members join a community based on either the positive or negative feelings they have towards a brand (Wilimzig, 2011). Further, individuals choose to join a Facebook brand community because they are loyal to that brand. Other motivations for joining these brand communities are economic benefits, such as discounts, and entertainment. Providing exclusive deals and discounts available only to members of the Facebook brand community is an incentive for individuals to join the community (Vorvoreanu, 2009). Syncapse (2013) report found the 42% like a brand page to get a coupon or reward. Weman (2011) found that consumers are not joining brand communities to make new friends or socialize and connect with strangers.
Facebook Page enables three interactions features connected with each post, such as: like, share and comment. When a user likes a post, this means that also other users can see that he has liked it (including their friends). The more likes the post gained, the higher value it has in the context of Page marketing value. Share feature makes it possible to publish someone's post on own profile (Time-line) or Page's. This is the way content goes viral in social media. The most engaging are comments -a feature that enables Facebook users sharing their thoughts about the post (Olczak & Sobczyk, 2013). This feature might be risky, if a dissatisfied customer attacks the company, criticizing its products or service. It can damage brand reputation, if there's no proper reaction from the Page moderator. Almost every major brand and company in India has a Facebook Page.

Customer Brand Engagement
In digital era, the term "consumer engagement" typically refers to the ways in which consumers engage with brands through digital channels, such as the brand's website, blogs, social networking sites, and videos. The term 'engagement' is defined as a mental state of enjoyment of the representation of an action or object (Laurel, 1993). The Consultancy defines engagement as "an outcome of repeated interactions that strengthen the emotional, psychological, or physical investment a customer has in a brand" (Mollen & Wilson, 2010, p. 919). Many other researchers define engagement as the simple act of participating in an online environment (Harden & Heyman, 2009;Solis, 2010). The engaged users metric can be found within Facebook Insights at both the Page and post levels. Engaged users aren't just limited to brand fans; anyone who engages with Brand Page is an engaged user. The page engagement is calculated by dividing absolute interactions (likes, comments, shares) by total fans. The number of comments, likes and shares is not an absolute measure, but is related to the number of page fans at the moment of posting, a ratio to the number of fans was used as more accurate engagement measure (Robinson, 2014).
Customer engagement is a psychological state, but can be manifested into action (Van Doorn et al., 2010 p. 13). Bowden (2009) defines customer engagement as a sequential psychological process that customers move through to become loyal towards a brand. Brodie et al., (2011) makes an extensive analysis of definitions and conceptualizations of the term engagement in social sciences and management disciplines, and the term customer engagement in the marketing and service literature. All the customer engagement behaviours are proposed to comprise five dimensions: valence (positive or negative), form and modality, scope (temporal and geographic),  Vol. 11, No. 26; higher number of daily active users than status and link wallposts. Photos touch people on an emotional level and are thus more often shared by users (Huber, Landheer, Probst, & Reisser, 2011). In addition, photos can increase the credibility of content and attract more attention than text. Moreover, the studies show the impact of different media types and find that photo and app wallposts lead to a higher number of daily active users than status and link wallposts.
A study by social media analytics company Fanpage Karma reveals that there are remarkable differences in engagement rates between categories (Fanpage Karma, 2013;Socialbakers, 2012). These studies show that the most engaging brands on Facebook belong to the following categories: sport, automobile, alcohol, airlines and services. Leung (2012) analysed the impact of post formats on generated engagement. He analysed the content of the Facebook pages of 12 hotels and found that links were the most commonly used post format (37.9%), followed by images (30.5%), plain text (28.7%) and video (2.9%). Cvijikj and Michahelles (2013) research study provides a coherent model which explains (1)  The key motivators for customer participation on online social media are learning benefits, social integrative benefits, personal integrative benefits and hedonic benefits.

Methodology
Our empirical investigation is implemented on Facebook, which is the largest social media platform in the world. Many top brands now maintain a Facebook page from which they serve posts and messages to connected users. This is a form of social media marketing that has increasingly become a popular and important channel for marketing. In order to collect the data and test the hypotheses established for this study, a sample of 134 Indian brands was selected using three important criteria: Active Official Facebook Brand Page, number of Indian fans and B2C brand. The list of brands to be considered was chosen from TRA's India's most attractive brand list.
The number of fans was also used as a selection criterion for this study. The leading Indian brands based on number of local fan count were checked using Social Bakers (2014) list. Upon visiting Facebook, a search was conducted to find the official page for each of the 150 brands. We searched each brand on Facebook to determine if it had an Indian Facebook page and how many fans it had. We identified 134 brands with a Facebook fan base of more than 100,000 fans. The time period of the data collection is between January 2014 to December 2014. 10169 posts were analyzed during this period and its engagement score is calculated based on number of likes, shares and comments. The results of the statistical analyses conducted for this study are summarized below. Firstly, descriptive statistics on the data analyzed is provided, followed by a summary of the regression analysis results. The 134 brands used for the study was categorized into their respective industry.

Results
The Table 1 presents the characteristics of the brand and its associated industry. The fan reach on Facebook is number of users actually manifested their interests for a brand and for consuming content from that brand via its profile page on a Facebook. The table 1 presents the number of total number of fans following the Facebook pages of each industry. Pepsi India has the highest number of fans, which is followed by Nivea, Sunsilk, Tata Docomo, and Samsung Mobile India. Average number of total fans is found to be higher in soft drink industry followed by telcom industry. Mobile brands and beauty brands shows the highest growth rate in fans in year 2014.  Table 2 presents the Facebook activates in their brand pages. It is related to the total number of posts during the data collection period. The post type is also listed in the table, status, photo, links, video and offers. Average post per brand is calculated by dividing the total post by the total number of brands studied in selected industry. Facebook enables users to interact with any kind of content on its platform: likes, comments and shares. A brand that posts a lot of content that is of little interest to its fans will be incrementally 'filtered out' of their news feeds by Facebook's algorithms. It's clear from Table 2 that most number of post are from online retailers and food retailers brands.
www.ccsenet.org/ass Asian Social Science Vol. 11, No. 26; Brands need fans to continuously interact with their content to generate presence in their news feeds. Table 3 shows that highest brand engagement in electronic retailers and lowest engagement rate is for soft-drinks brands. The highest average an interaction per post is related to mobile phone brands and lowest is related to travel brands eshops post the most followed by retail food industry. Post interactions are measured using like, comments and number of shares. The total number of posts of 134 selected brand pages is 12,925 and total interaction is 21,591,353. Average interaction is highest for offers and least for links. 89.5% of the posts are photos, which is followed by videos.  Table 4 presents to type of post and the total interactions. Table 4 shows that Picture has the most number of post interaction, which is followed by link. If we look at the average likes, Offer and Video has the highest number of likes. Comment is highest for status and offer and video has the highest number of shares. The results show's that photos and offers increase the average customer interaction. 83% of the post is picture type and Offer is only used by few brands. But Average likes and comments is highest for offers, which is followed by video posts.  Table 5 shows the type of post and its average interaction. Average interaction is considerable higher for offers, which is followed by photos and link. 82.98% of the post from the sample is picture type, which is followed by Link and Video.  A regression analysis was conducted according to the proposed conceptual model for customer engagement. The model using the selected variable was found to be significant (F=14.643; p=0.001), with a low model fit, resulting in a R 2 of 0.271. The result shows that number of links post and status posts variable of the conceptual model is not a significant factor to increase brand engagement. Number of fans following, number of videos posted and total number of posted is associated with customer engagement. Overall the research results show the consumer engagement depends on Facebook activities like total fans, total number of videos posted and total number of posts on the wall page. The total number of posts in brand page is considered as the most important factor to increase consumer engagement in Facebook fan pages.

Conclusions
An encouraging number of Indian brands had established an official Facebook page at the time this study was conducted. Several Indian brands have significantly large numbers of users who "like" them, which suggests that the brand is popular but the sheer number of likes does not definitively measure sales figures or purchase intentions. Companies are using Facebook for a variety of purposes but the focus seems to be more on trying to develop relationships with consumers rather than on simply providing information. The research shows that the key determinants for consumer engagement are content-related and frequency of brand posting activities and not on number of fans following the page. The paper is an initial attempt to develop a theoretical framework for customer engagement and further research is required to better understand several aspects of the framework. Future research can also investigate more Indian brands and compare it with other countries engagement rate. The paper develops a conceptual model of customer engagement that improves understanding of the concept and provides the foundation for strategies to increase their engagement in Facebook Pages. The results presented in this paper are limited to Indian Facebook brand pages only.