How social media engagement affects TV channel loyalty among Ho Chi Minh city audiences - Mediating roles of social presence and channel loyalty
Abstract
In light of the digital era development, there have been a number of researches about
the effects of social media engagement on a brand loyalty. Undoubtedly, every brand faces
the same opportunities and threats within social networking world, and the TV program
industry is not the exception. Broadcasters become aware of the advantages brought about
by social TV activity (backchannel communication pre-, during, or after the programs on
social media network) on increasing channel rating.
Nonetheless, in Vietnam, there has been quite small number of researches on this
topic to help this industry with an insightful database to compete in this market. Therefore,
this paper aims to investigate the influence of social media engagement on TV channel
loyalty, because people nowadays use most of their time interacting with other users online.
They find it even harder to give up on the internet or cell phones than TV (Rodriguez, 2018).
Moreover, take a closer look into social media engagement framework, there are 3 main
factors playing powerful roles, which are Functional Engagement, Emotional Engagement,
and Communal Engagement. Especially, the research is based mainly on Lim et. Al
research in 2015, with the effects of two mediating factors, namely Social Presence and
Channel Commitment. (Lim, 2015). This paper is adapted following Lim’s research to fit
well with Vietnamese people by adding some related items in the previous papers.
According to the analysis of 252 responses, who are Ho Chi Minh City viewers and
have experienced social TV activity. After analyzing, the Communal Engagement factor
was left out because it has no significant impact on the model itself. The rest of the proposed
hypotheses adapted from Lim et al. and other previous papers remain the same, excluding
some omitted items through the test of Exploratory Factor Analysis. The model is finally
well-explained for the Channel Loyalty with nearly 62%.
Keywords: social media engagement, social presence, channel commitment,
emotional engagement, functional engagement, communal engagement, channel loyalty.
Paper type: Research Paper