Perceptions and Motivations of User Engagement for Social Media Marketing : A Quantitative Study of Facebook and Instagram Users

Abstract: Social media marketing has gained tremendous attention in recent years and has become a powerful tool for companies, entrepreneurs and marketers to approach their target customers and cultivate longtime customer relationship with increased engagement. Despite the increasing investment on social media marketing and the increasingly important roles users play today, few of previous studies, however, were focused on the user behavior or the key factors that influence user engagement with brands on social media. We chose the technology acceptance model (TAM) and uses and gratifications theory (UGT) as our theoretical foundation to investigate user behaviors on social media and the factors that influence user engagement with brands. We tested our model in two different social media platforms; Facebook and Instagram. The conclusions were based on inputs from a survey with 126 respondents with diverse background and age groups. We tested the hypotheses utilizing statistic correlation analyses. Among the five researched variables, H1 (perceived usefulness) and H5 (motivation for information) are proved to be statically significant. Despite a number of limitations, our research sheds a light on the study of user behavior on social media platforms. Understanding user behavior is useful for entrepreneurs and marketers in shaping more efficient ways to target the right audience on the right platform(s) to achieve their marketing objectives by effectively exploiting the potential of social media.