Drivers And Outcomes Of Social Media Advertising Engagement: A Survey Of University Of Ghana Students

Abstract

Increasingly, advertisers and marketers have taken advantage of social media platforms to complement marketing and advertising. Social media offer firms a cheaper alternative to target prospective customers and as such firms are devising ways to trigger engagement from social media users since these users are mostly online for a plethora of reasons. This research was guided by the Elaboration Likelihood Model to examine drivers and outcomes of social media advertising engagement. Survey responses from 180 students of the University of Ghana were collected and a regression model was used to test four hypotheses. Findings indicated that social media addiction, market mavenism and product involvement were drivers of social media advertising engagement. Additionally, ad sharing is an outcome after respondents engaged with ads on social media. The study revealed that respondents tend to focus more on the creativity in ads when engaging with social media ads than to scrutinize the message and the implication is that advertisers must tailor their messages in a creative manner in order to trigger engagement. Importantly, a measure for social media advertising engagement was developed since there was none currently existing – this is to help future studies in the area of social media advertising engagement and for advertisers to know the nature of engagement of social media users.