A model for consumer engagement in eWOM via social media

Abstract

Over the last few years consumer engagement has highly attracted the interest of marketing academics and practitioners. The present paper reports the preliminary findings of an ongoing research project on the development of a model for consumer engagement in eWOM via social media. It is suggested that the consumer engagement process in social media moves through four sequential stages; participation, engrossment, emotion sharing and relationship building (the PEER model). The validity of the model in the context of twitter was empirically tested through the use of an online version of the LIWC software. Overall 10.801 tweets for two highly advertised mega-brand events (organized by Apple and Nintendo in the USA) were collected and text analyzed providing strong support to the model.