Title: Users' engagement on Facebook: a cluster analysis

Authors: Rania S. Hussein; Abeer A. Mahrous

Addresses: School of Business, The American University in Cairo, P.O. Box 11835 New Cairo, Egypt ' Business Administration Department, Faculty of Commerce, Cairo University, P.O. Box 12613, Giza, Egypt

Abstract: Social media platforms have shown dramatic growth in the past few years. Social media presents a wealth of marketing opportunities for companies. Companies can use these platforms to do tailored marketing, to build more effective customer relationship management programs and to engage their customers, just to name a few. Understanding social media users' characteristics and behaviour on social media is critical. This paper delineates an exploratory study to understand users' engagement on social media by attempting to segment and classify Facebook users, being the most popular social media platform, segmenting Facebook users will be based on users' motives to log on to Facebook, usage patterns, lifestyle, attitudes towards Facebook and demographic variables. A sample of 290 users was drawn from the Facebook users in Egypt. Data was analysed using two stages cluster analysis technique. Three different clusters were obtained namely; socialisers, laggards and information seekers, each with different characteristics and Facebook usage patterns. Socialisers and information seekers are the most frequent users of Facebook, while the laggards are the least frequent users of Facebook with an intention of discontinuation. This study provides useful marketing insights and implications to companies in developing their marketing strategies.

Keywords: social media; Facebook users; user engagement; customer profiling; cluster analysis; Egypt; user behaviour; marketing strategies; user motives; motivation; usage patterns; lifestyle; user attitudes; demographic variables.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBEM.2016.079790

International Journal of Business and Emerging Markets, 2016 Vol.8 No.4, pp.426 - 445

Received: 11 Mar 2015
Accepted: 02 Jan 2016

Published online: 14 Oct 2016 *

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