Exploring Customer Engagement and Sharing Behavior in Social Media Brand Communities: Curvilinear Effects and the Moderating Roles of Perceived Innovativeness and Perceived Interactivity: An Abstract

Abstract

Given the increasing attention to building customer–brand relationships within online brand communities (OBC) in social media, this study examines the link between customer engagement (CE) and customer sharing behaviours across the USA and China. This study draws upon the perspective of CE to investigate how the customer–brand relationship within the OBC affects sharing behavioural intentions under different levels of perceived OBC interactivity and innovativeness intensity. Based on a sample of 1259 OBC followers (595 US and 664 Chinese) respondents in two different social media platforms (Facebook and Weibo), hierarchical moderated regression analyses reveal that while the relationship seems straightforward, its impact is more nuanced across country markets and platforms. Our results indicate an inverted U-shaped relationship between CE and sharing behaviours, indicating there is a limit to the beneficial effect of CE. However, we consider two moderators that may influence the nonlinear relationship between CE and sharing behaviours which show that these moderating effects vary across countries. Within the US context (OBC in Facebook social media platform), the results show that perceived OBC innovativeness mitigates the U-shape effect and becomes a linear relationship. Further, considering perceived OBC interactivity, there still exists an inverted U-shaped effect although the nonlinear effect becomes lessened. Within the China context (OBC in Weibo social media platform), the moderators also impact the inverted U-shape effect, but when considering the increasing effect of perceived OBC innovativeness or perceived OBC interactivity, the inverted U-shape between CE and sharing behaviours becomes more pronounced. These results suggest that social media brand managers in the USA can increase perceived OBC interactivity and perceived OBC innovativeness in order to reduce the negative impact of CE on sharing behaviours, whereas in China, social media brand managers should be mindful of heightened perceived OBC interactivity and perceived OBC innovativeness levels to strengthen the negative impact of CE on sharing behaviours. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.