What Factors Influence User Engagement?

Di Gangi, P. M., & Wakso, M. M. (2016). Social media engagement theory: Exploring the influence of user engagement on social media usage. Journal of Organizational and End User Computing, 28(2), 53–73. doi:10.4018/JOEUC.2016040104

In this article, the authors examined the factors that shape user engagement in social media, and how such engagement affects social media usage behavior. Building upon the model of co-creation in the service sector (Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2004), the authors provide a framework for social media engagement that focuses on “the social interactions among users that are supported by the social media platform provided by an organization” (p. 55). For the two elements of user experience, social interaction was operationalized as personalization, access to social resources, risk, and transparency; and technical features was operationalized as completeness, flexibility, evolvability, and integration. The authors surveyed 441 social media users (with 408 usable responses) using a mixed-method approach and multiple measures (for the operationalized variables above as well as user engagement, social media usage, demographic variables, and habit), as well as open-ended questions. After a variety of analyses, the findings showed that user engagement and usage is influenced by a variety of social and technical factors, with the operationalized variables of (a) the critical mass of social acquaintances and (b) risk showing the strongest associations.  

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