Consumer Engagement With Visual Content on Instagram

Abstract

Despite Instagram’s popularity among the Y and Z generation consumers, social media research investigating factors that can influence customer engagement on Instagram remains limited. The uses and gratifications theory underpins this study which investigates how social media marketing of prominent Malaysian brands on Instagram impacts customer engagement. ScrapeStorm web scraper tool was used to extract posts and comments from the public Instagram accounts of four notable Malaysian brands. The findings reveal that different features of social media, affect consumer engagement differently. Social media influencers had a positive impact on consumption and creation-based customer engagement. Contextual features are negatively correlated with contribution-based customer engagement. In terms of content, videos had greater engagement rates, followed by images of people and images without people. Results also show that consumers reacted positively to informative textual content. Some implications for theory and practice are highlighted.