Impact of customer engagement with social media marketing on creating brand awareness in the context of mobitel - telecommunication service provider

Abstract

For marketers, social media has the power to achieve great results for very minimal cost, and in less time; however, doing so creates incalculable risks that many businesses are not yet prepared to take. One such risk relates to the issue of how engagement with consumers via social media tight impact consumers’ subsequent behavior. Social media marketing is a growing trend and there could be significant advantages for the early movers who take advantage of this. Very _ few companies in Sri Lanka are seemed to be taking advantage of this. One reason could be the relative lack of internet users in Sri Lanka and even from that users, only a very few purchase anything online. Having said that number of users in social networking sites like Facebook is growing rapidly in Sri Lanka and this presents a great chance to improve brand awareness and of course to improve sales.

However, researchers are somewhat lagging behind this rapid development and it is difficult to find relevant up to date studies on how social media are to be part of the branding process, how this relates to the strategy that companies have with the use of social media if they are to be used to strengthen the brand, increase sales and find new customers. In the specific area, a research gap was noticed, namely, how customer engagement with social media creates the branding process. Based on this gap, five hypotheses and a research model were prepared. The study was done via an on-line questionnaire posted total population group of Facebook users who have liked the “Mobitel Sri Lanka” page on Facebook. In the research process to analyze the collected data I use the statistical package for social science (SPS$22.0). Data were analyzed through a questionnaire issued to Facebook users who liked “Mobitel Sri Lanka” page. It is especially considered univariate analysis consist of mean, standard deviation, and bivariate analysis used to measure the magnitude and direction of the relationship between customer engagement with social media marketing and brand awareness. This study conducted It was revealed through the results, that customer engagement with social media has a strong positive relationship with Brand Awareness. Further, According to the analysis, mainly interaction and influence contributed highly to the customer engagement with social media marketing in the creation of Brand awareness than other variables, therefore marketers can specifically focus on the interaction and influence to increase the customer engagement with social media marketing. In addition, I would like to suggest that future research can be carried out to analyse the role of customer engagement with social media marketing on brand equity.