آیا مصرف کنندگان می توانند بر میکروبلاگ های برند ترغیب شوند؟ یک مطالعه تجربی Can consumers be persuaded on brand microblogs? An empirical study

1. Introduction Concurrent with the prevalence of social media, microblogging services have become increasingly popular in enabling users to push short messages and follow the communications of others on the Internet. A recent report shows that Twitter, the global microblogging service, has become the most predominant social media site (other sites included Facebook, YouTube, and Corporate blogs) adopted by the top 100 Fortune Global 500 Companies [1]. Many companies have begun to adopt these services to create brand microblogs and harness their marketing potential [2]. On the other hand, companies often vary in their performances in this context. For instance, Brandwatch monitored 253 popular global brands and found that 69% of them use Twitter as a channel for both broadcasting and engagement, whereas 25% rarely have consumer engagement [3]. On the basis of engagement metrics such as the numbers of comments and retweets, another report ranked the performance of 98 fastmoving consumer goods brands on Facebook and Twitter and found that IRN-BRU ranked the highest and Uncle Ben’s the lowest [4]. The varied performances raise emerging concerns about how a company can better engage with brand followers (e.g., encourage followers to participate) and further influence them (e.g., transform general followers into loyal consumers). Prior empirical research showed that participation and brand loyalty are two critical concerns in understanding the sustainability and influence of online brand communities [5,6]. A successful brand community is expected to have active engagement from users and influence them to become more loyal toward the brand [7–9]. Accordingly, in this study, we attempt to understand how companies can use brand microblogs to influence followers’ participation and subsequently to influence their brand loyalty. We refer to participation as the likelihood that followers will (1) carefully read messages posted by companies, (2) forward the messages to their own network of followers, and (3) comment on these messages [10–12]. According to Jang et al.’s [13] definition, we refer to brand loyalty as the extent to which followers are willing to purchase the products of the brands and further recommend them to others