Online Customer Engagement as A Mediating Variable Between Social-Media Marketing and Customer Satisfaction: Using Big Data Analytics and Natural Language Processing

Abstract

Purpose – This study empirically investigates marketing activities on social media of American airline firms and assesses their impact on firm performance and customer satisfaction. More than 3 million tweets are retrieved from the firms’ Twitter timelines over 60 months from 2017 to 2021. These tweets are then analyzed using machine learning algorithms and big data analytics. Design/methodology/approach – The authors using Big Data Analytics and Natural Language Processing beside additional company-specific covariates in the control variables to adjust for other characteristics that are well known to effect social media marketing, online consumer engagement, and firm performance represented in customer satisfaction. Findings – Reveal that, in general, social media marketing positively affects both online customer engagement and customer satisfaction. Furthermore, the analyses show that online customer engagement enhances firms’ customer satisfaction. The findings also show that online customer engagement fully mediates the impact of a company's social media marketing on its customer satisfaction score. Practical implications – The current study extends the brand literature's previous operationalization of customer engagement behavior with social media activities by assessing consumption, contribution, and creation activities collaboratively, and translating it into action. Therefore, the literature shows several gaps in the research on customer engagement on social media, especially in the sector of airline companies. . Originality/value –Our findings imply that American airline companies' use of social media to boost trendiness, customization, and entertainment pays off in terms of enhancing customer engagement with brand-related social media content. As a result, this research shows its most significant implications for practice which is the importance of investing in the trendiness, customization, and entertainment aspects of social media activities for American airline firms. Keywords: Big data analytics, machine learning, social media marketing, natural language processing, customer engagement, customer satisfaction.