“Actually Having Conversations and Talking to People”: Defining Social Media Engagement
Keywords:
social media engagement, social media, social media users, social media engagement definitionAbstract
While previous attempts to conceptualize social media engagement have yielded limited building blocks to clarify the phenomenon, those attempts primarily resulted in frameworks generated by advertising, organizational literature, and media histories. Instead of asking users how they understand engagement within social media contexts and spaces, previous attempts myopically defined the concept by pointing at the way users use the social tools given them. This study asked heavy social media users to provide a definition of social media engagement without referencing previous advertising, marketing, organizational, or media research terms, and without referencing specific social media spaces or technologies. The results show that users conceptualize social media engagement as a connective and interactive phenomenon where users attend to others in ways that speak to collective understanding of the world and time. Generated from these thematics, social media users appear to comprehend engagement as communication that requires attentiveness to others without being constrained by technology.
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Baird, C. H. & Parasnis G. (2011). From social media to social customer relationship management. Strategy & Leadership, 39(5), 30-37.
Bowden, J. L. (2009). The process of customer engagement: A conceptual framework. Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice, 17(1), 63-74.
Britten, B. (2013). Losing control: Using social media to engage and connect. Journal of Magazine & New Media Research, 14(2), 1-3.
Calvert, S. L., Strong, B. L., & Gallagher, L. (2005). Control as an engagement feature for young children’s attention to and learning of computer content. The American Behavioral Scientist, 48(5), 578-587.
Crofts, K., & Bisman, J. (2010). Interrogating accountability: An illustration of the use of Leximancer software for qualitative data analysis. Qualitative Research in Accounting and Management, 7(2), 180-207.
Dickey, M. D. (2005). Engaging by design: How engagement strategies in popular computer and video games can inform instructional design. Educational Technology, Research and Development 53(2), 67-83.
Gautami, A., Suganthi, F., Suganthi, L., & Sivakumaran, B. (20014). If you blog will they follow? Using online media to set the agenda for consumer concerns on “greenwashed” environmental claims. Journal of Advertising, 43(2), 167-180.
Gephart, R. (1997). Hazardous measures: An interpretive textual analysis of quantitative sensemaking during crises. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 18(1), 583-622.
Gilstrap, D. (2012). Ericsson mobility report: On the pulse of the networked society. Retrieved June 4, 2014, from http://www.ericsson.com
Glaser, B. G., & Strauss, A. L. (1967). The discovery of grounded theory.
Chicago: Aldine.
Heldman, A. B., Schindelar, J., & Weaver, J. B. III (2013). Social media engagement and public health communication: Implications for public health organizations being truly “social.” Public Health Reviews, 35(1), 1-18.
Hendrickson, E. (2013). Learning to share: Magazines, millennials, and mobile. Journal of Magazine & New Media Research. 14(2), 1-7.
Kukulska-Hulme, A. (2010). Learning cultures on the move: Where are we heading? Educational Technology & Society, 13(4), 4-14.
Lee, D., Hosanagar, K., & Nair, H. (July 24, 2013). The effect of advertising content on consumer engagement: Evidence from Facebook. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2290802
McCorkindale, T., DiStaso, M. W., & Sisco, H. F. (2013). How millennials are engaging and building relationships with organizations on Facebook. The Journal of Social Media in Society, 2(1), 66-87.
Napoli, P. M. (2011). Audience evolution: New technologies and the transformation of
media audiences. New York: Columbia University Press.
Rybalko, S., & Seltzer, T. (2010). Dialogic communication in 140 characters or less: How fortune 500 companies engage stakeholders using Twitter. Public Relations Review, 36, 336-341
Sashi, C. M. (2012). Customer engagement, buyer-seller relationships, and social media. Management Decision, 50(2), 253-272.
Singh, A., Kumar, B., & Singh, V. K. (2010). Customer engagement: New key metric of marketing. International Journal of Arts and Sciences, 3(13), 347-356.
Smith, A., & Humphreys, M. (2006). Evaluation of unsupervised semantic mapping of
natural language with Leximancer concept mapping. Behavior Research Methods,
38(2), 262-279.
Strauss, A., & Corbin, J. (1990). Basics of qualitative research: Grounded theory
procedures and techniques. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
Strauss, A. L., & Corbin, J. (1999). Basics of qualitative research: Techniques and
procedures for developing grounded theory (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
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2016-09-30
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