Abstract:
The purpose of this article is to study the impact of firm-created and usergenerated social media communication on brand association through Facebook. This
study evaluated 262 data sets that were generated through a standardized online survey
to investigate the impact of firm-created and user-generated social media brand
communication on brand associations, across 3 brands within the mobile network
service providers in Sri Lanka. The study was applied a structural equation modeling
technique to investigate the effects of social media communication on brand
association. The results of the empirical studies showed that both firm-created and
user-generated social media brand communication influence brand associations. This
study is pioneering in that it exposes the effects of two different types of social media
communication such as firm-created and user-generated social media brand
communication on brand association, this study of relevance for both marketers and
scholars in the era of social media. Additionally, this included the recommendations
for practitioners, strategies to create effective social media brand communication.
