Facebook engagement—motivational drivers and the moderating effect of flow episodes and age differences

Abstract

The rise of Facebook creates opportunities for consumers to entertain, present themselves and interact socially as well as for organizations and brands, who can utilize this social networking site (SNS) as a strategic tool in their integrated marketing communication. Despite engagement being considered a key success factor for content and services on Facebook, an issue still to address is how to trigger a Facebook user’s engagement. This paper is one of the few to theoretically and empirically investigate Facebook engagement and its psychological, motivational drivers. Drawing theoretical insights from uses and gratifications theory, theoretical accounts of flow and the socioemotional selectivity theory, we build and validate a model that connects the motivations that underlie Facebook behavior to involvement-related, emotional and conative facets of Facebook engagement. We test the model with the partially least squares approach on a sample of active Facebook users. The results strongly support the causal, mediating and moderating relationships included in the model. They show that three distinct types of motivational orientation (toward enjoyment, self-disclosure and community identification) contribute to a Facebooker’s engagement behavior. Importantly, the findings reveal that flow episodes strengthen the causal path from enjoyment-related motivation towards engagement, and that the impact of engagement on continued use of Facebook is greater for older Facebookers than among younger users. Based on these findings, the paper provides practical knowledge for organizations making use of Facebook and bears implications for the managers of brands that have active Facebook pages.