Customer engagement strategies in Social Media: The case of Malaysian Automotive Industry Kamisah Kormin, Rohaizat Baharun Faculty of Management, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Skudai, Johor Bahru Email:
[email protected],
[email protected]
Social media technology offers a new way of modern and powerful marketing strategy due to its interactivity, popularity and audience reach. Industry managers are getting aware the importance of social media adoption to engage their customers as the process to deliver value and strenghten relationship. However, to what extant Malaysian industries engage with social media is still not known. Therefore, this paper aimed to provide an overview of the use of social media for customer engagement among Malaysian Automotive Industry and analysis of their success. Data collected through content analysis method to the top 20 Malaysian automotive companie’s website and Facebook found that all Malaysian automotive companies have at least one social media presence and Facebook is the most popular platfrom among others. It indicated that the companies have begun to fully embrace the enormous benefits that social media offers. However, despite their presence in multiple platforms and highly responsive of their customer service, most of the company fails to attract sufficient customer engagement that leads to the failure of their Facebook campaign. Lastly, suggestions to Malaysian managers are also provided. Keywords; social media, Malaysian companies, customer engagement, content anaysis, Facebook
1.0
Introduction
The growth of social media has dramatically reshaped the entire process of customer engagement. The old way tactics of offline engagement such as inviting customers in company’s events and telemarketing are still practical and relevant, however, its popularity is now replaced by new tactic of engagement through online medium such as social media. Social media has changed how companies communicate with stakeholders; therefore it is important that companies learn how to take advantage of this new media, especially for communication purposes. Social network sites seem to provide tremendous opportunities for organizations to engage stakeholders in a dialogic communication (Rybalko and Seltzer, 2010), discuss, share, listen to their opinion and respond quickly to their critism. With the growing emphasis on social media, how to effectively utilize this new media environment has become one of the most important topics in public relations and marketing research. Kaplan and Haenlein (2010) defined social media as a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content. From this definition, social media can be divided into few categories such as business network (eg; LinkedIn), Collaborative project (eg; Wikipedia), Microblog (eg; Twitter), Photo sharing (eg; Flickr, Instagram), Video sharing (eg; YouTube, Vimeo), product review (eg; Ebay, Amazon) and social network (eg; Facebook, Myspace). Facebook has gained the highest popularity among Malaysian, especially for socialising purpose, with almost half of Malaysian Internet users identifying it as their favourite social platform (48%) and 88% visiting the site weekly. WhatsApp is not far behind for weekly use, at 72% of Malaysian Internet users, however it’s the favourite platform for
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just one fifth of the population (19%). Malaysian is one of the most socially engaged with social media in the world. The survey among 50,0000 in 46 countries made by TNS’s Connected Life in year 2014 revealed that three fifths (62%) of Internet users in Malaysia access social media networks daily, compared to 42% globally, whilst 52% use instant messaging every day. Malaysians have an average of 233 friends in their social network, followed by 231 in Brazil and 217 in Norway whereas Japanese users had the least number of friends at an average of 29. High Internet penetration is may be contributed to the highly social media engagement among Malaysian. Table 1: Social media use in Malaysia Weekly users - Malaysia (%)
Weekly users - global %
Facebook YouTube
88 76
47 35
WhatsApp
72
22
Facebook Messenger
71
28
WeChat
61
30
Google +
52
28
Line
43
10
Instagram
36
11
Skype
36
15
Twitter
30
16
Yahoo! Messenger
30
12
Viber
21
7
LinkedIn
16
6
Tumblr
16
6
Snapchat
12
5
Platform
Source: TNS (2014) According to the 2013/2014 Economic Report published by Ministry Of Finance recently, the number of Internet users in Malaysia is expected to increase to 25 million by 2015 from 18 million in 2012. The report said the rate of household broadband penetration increased to 66.8 percent at the end of June 2013, while the mobile phone penetration rate exceeds 100 percent, there are now 42.6 million subscribers. Statistics also show that more Internet users in Malaysia are the buyer against the seller with a market size of online transactions in Malaysia is expected to reach RM5 billion by 2014 compared to RM1.8 billion in 2010. Further stated in the report is that Malaysia is one of the three core countries in Asia that actively use Internet for online shopping, for instance; air tickets and hotel bookings as well as spearheaded the purchase of products and services online. This statistic provides an evidance that an increasing number of Internet users and online shoppers illustrate the potential of a huge market for online
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business. In this regard, social media can play very important role for business transaction and performance, that every companies must adopt to stay competitive and for their own reputation. Despite to the rapidly growing of Internet and social media usage among Malaysian, the data of social media adoption among Malaysian companies is unknown due to scare literatures of social media studies within Malaysia. Therefore, this paper has the purpose to give an insight on customer engagement strategies in social media among Malaysian companies focusing on Automotive industry, which the main aim is two folds: First; analysis on social media platfrom used to engage customers and secondly, their level of engagement and performance in Facebook campaign. With the significant benefits that social media offers for increasing customer engagement and limited literatures of social media practice in Malaysia, this paper is hope to add knowledge to managers and academic scholar on the current scenario of social media engagement within Malaysian Automotive Industry. The structure of the paper starts with literature review, methodology used, finding of the study, discussion and recommendation to the Malaysian managers. 2.0
Literature review
2.1
Social media
In recent years, social media have grown more quickly than other forms of digital media (Tuten 2008). Not surprisingly, therefore, social media has attracted increasing interest in both academic and practitioners. They wish to understand social media in order to establish new ways in which to communicate with customers. Wikipedia defines Social media as a computer-mediated tools that allow people to create, share or exchange information, ideas, and pictures/videos in virtual communities and networks. While, Kaplan and Haenlein (2010) defined social media as a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content. Furthermore, social media depend on mobile and web-based technologies to create highly interactive platforms through which individuals and communities share, co-create, discuss, and modify user-generated content. They introduce substantial and pervasive changes to communication between organizations, communities, and individuals (Kietzmann et al., 2011). Agichtein et al (2008) came to a similar conclusion about social media; they describe the term as “popular user-generated content domains that include blogs and Web forums, social bookmarking sites, photo and video sharing communities, as well as social networking platforms such as Facebook and MySpace, which offer a combination of all of these with an emphasis on the relationships among the users of the community”. Boyd and Ellison (2007) give a definition of the Social Network Site as ”as web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system.” To summarize the descriptions above, definitions of social media center around three main fundamentals; web based technology, content provided by the users; and dialogues and relationships among users of community. 2.2
Why and how company should engages with social media
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Customer engagement in social media (or popularly known as online customer engagement) is an extension of the theory of customer relationship management. This new theory has gained increasing attention due to the rise of social networking sites. Customer engagement is context specific (Roderick et al., 2011), therefore; social media is a context that allow the creation and exchange of User Generated Content (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010), represent a rich context for engagement manifestations, as they foster the creation of strong, interactive consumer relationships (Gummerus et al., 2012). One of the main objectives of firm engaging with social media is to attract as much as customer engagement, increasing interaction and develops relationships among them, which in turn add value to the brand as a whole. Most of the companies now have engaged with social media to take advantage of the special features that are not available or limited among traditional medium such as: a.
Cost factor According to Weinberg (2009), the main advantage of social media marketing is cost-related. Because of the financial crisis, firms try to find cheap solutions for promoting their brand; social media allow them to make their brand better known at a low cost ((Tsimonis and Dimitriadis, 2013). The financial barriers to social media marketing are quite low compared to others (Hennig-Turau et al., 2010; Ioakimidis, 2010; Abeza et al., 2013). This is due to the fact that the majority of social media sites are free to access even for business use where the business can create profile and post information. Apart from that, advertising cost is social media for instance; through cost-per-click (CPC), cost-per-impression (CPI) and click through rate (CTR) are very cheap. They can cost 40-60% less than ads on traditional channels like print, television and radio (Calliduscloud, 2015). In contrast to a TV campaign that can cost $100,000 to produce, a social media advertisement on Twitter or Facebook for example, can cost as little as $1-$5 per click (Calliduscloud, 2015).
b.
Interact and develop relationship In today’s interactive environment, two-ways communication or push-pull model has replaced the old one-way communication push-model, where the power to control the communication has shited from company (before), to the customers (now). Therefore, if the brand wants to succeed in social media, the relationship between brand and customer should be nurtured carefully. Marketing researchers have noted the importance of generating more effective brand-consumer interactions and engagement with respect to sales growth, superior competitive advantage and profitability (Roderick et al, 2011). Investment in relationships ensures the longevity of an organization’s positive reputation in a number of important ways: (a) by helping to spread the word of newly released products, (b) by providing useful feedback on products and services, (c) as an early warning system for potential problems, and (d) through advocacy when problems do arise (Alsop, 2004).
c.
Create awareness
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Social media can always be used to generate rapid awareness through customer base by announcing and advertising in the network, driving the much needed awareness to notify the new services and products (Danias and Kavoura, 2013) as well as to publish and disseminate personal evaluations of products and services (Chen et al., 2011). d.
Reach and Virality The advantage that social media marketing has over offline methods is that the potential number of people the firm can reach is much higher. Among traditional sources of communication, social media have been established as mass phenomena with a wide demographic appeal (Kaplan and Haenlein 2010). The viral nature of social media means that each person who reads your posts has the capability to spread the news farther within his own network, so information can reach a large number of people in a short time (Weinberg, 2009). According to ComScore (2011), for each incremental day branded content is published on the brand Facebook page, reach among fans increases by 2.5%. Social media currently have a far greater capacity for reaching the general public than do traditional media, such as television, radio, and magazines (K. L. Keller 2009). Many businesses have a limited customer base; with social media, they have the chance to reach billions of users, both in and out of your geographic area. As for 2015, social media active users are over 2.206 billions or about 30% of total populations in the world (Regan, 2015). This statistics provide strong evidance that makes social media well worth for time, money and energy.
e.
Lead generation 61% of US marketers have admitted that the main reason why their company has implemented a Social Media strategy is to increase lead generation (Hubspot, 2012). Lead generation is a process to attract prospect customer. With the millions of users connecting everyday on the different Social Media sites, every business is bound to have some prospective customers somewhere on these sites. Therefore, by gaining more and more followers online, brands can raise their chances of generating new customers. According to Hubspot (2012), B2C companies that blog generate 88% more leads per month than those who do not, and B2B companies generate 67% more. Similarly, a study conducted by ComScore (2011) indicated that the advertiser’s ads in websites increased by an average of 94% the likelihood that users will conduct a search using keywords related to the brand. Therefore, there is no doubt that any business implementing a Social Media Marketing strategy will benefit of leads generation. This type of behavior is particularly relevant among today’s younger teen and 20-something consumer who is active on social media platforms and whose brand preference is heavily influenced by friends and peers (Haven, 2007). Companies hope to engage with loyal consumers and influence individuals’ perceptions about their products, spread information, and learn from and about their audience (Brodie et al. 2013).
f.
Financial performance Aggressive and effective use of social media marketing is proved to have positive
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impact on financial performance of the company. A study conducted by DEI Worldwide (2008) revealled that: 70% of consumers have visited social media sites to get information, 49% of them have made a purchase decision based on information they got from social media. Similarly, in 2009, Altimeter Group, a leading digital media consultant and in cooperation with the WETPAINT, a social content hosting company, conducted a study entitled Engagementdb: Ranking the Top 100 Brands (2009) among 100 world’s top brands, in an atempt to find a correlation between a brand’s social engagement and its financial performance. Their study found that the brands most heavily engaged in Social Media Marketing show 18% revenue growth as compared to 6% revenue decline for the brands that were not engaged. Choosing the right strategies is the key of successful engagement. The first thing that is considered very important strategy is to choose the most appropriate social media platform (Socialmediatoday, 2014; Tsimonis and Dimitriadis, 2013; Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010) as the popularity of social media varies across country. For instance; Sina weibo is the most popular platform in China, with around 280 million active users and 500 million registered users (SocialmediaToday, 2014). The government restriction of the Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in China, may be support the popularity of local version of social media platform; including Sina weibo. However, in Malaysia, Sina weibo is almost not known, but Facebook has gained tremendous popularity. Another important strategy is the company’s proactiveness in generating content (or also known as post) in their selected social media platform. Since, social media are all about sharing and interaction, Kaplan and Haenlein (2010) adviced the companies to be active by ensuring that the content is always fresh and that the companies engage in discussions with their customers. Content (or also known, brand post/message) is a nucleus and main attraction of any social media marketing. Content is defined by Kliatchko (2009) as the link with “participatory media”, in which people are active participants of the creation of message. Content is a powerful strategy to attract customer engagement in firm’s social media and as emotional tie if it is written and presented in attractive and compelling manner. Therefore, to achieve higher customer engagement, every company must update their content regularly (Ashley and Tuten, 2015; Verisign, 2015), or in average, once per day for big brands, however, Matista (2015) suggest that for small brand, they must update the facebook content around five time per day to have a better chance to appear in user’s news feed. Updated social media content creates real value and interaction for customers or fan, where they feel that they are really getting something out of following the brand page (such as new product information, questions and comments that are answered to), and that the brands are worth having a relationship with (twentyfoursocial, 2013). By producing fresh content in social media interactions with customers, marketers would foster customers’ social media engagement with the brand and better meet customers’ needs (Rohm and Kalhcheva, 2013). On the companies’ blogs, pages and profiles, customers can leave feedbacks, expressing their true thoughts and feelings about a company and its products and services, as well as to request help and support. In this regard, firm’s customer service play an important role to respond as feedback encourages further dialog and interaction, which helps manage conflict more effectively, improves understanding for both stakeholder and organization, and addresses stakeholder concerns (Doerfel et al., 2003) and the responses should be cordial, clear, and detailed (Bennett and Martin, 2008) to
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avoid frustration not only by the information seeker or commentor, rather by other members in the community, which may lead them to disseminate negative comment to the firm in online or offline platform. Therefore, the solvation of an issue in a satisfactionary manner is important strategy to foster customer engagement, loyalty and trust. 2.3
The role of customer engagement and the success of social media campaign
When using social media for marketing campaign, it is not only important to set objectives, but also to measure its success by using relevant metrics (Hoffman & Fodor 2010; Peters et al. 2013). Measurement is critical and confusing since there is no unifed view amongst academic and practitioners on the best formula but it understood that it is difficult to use financial data the measure the success. For example, Blanchard (2011) claimed that there is still no clear evidence to prove that 10,000 new followers/fans on the firm’s social media account will lead to 8,000 new customers, and $2 million increase in firm’s sales revenue. Further, he proposed that the metric should involve multiple layers of data analysis to connect both financial (i.e. 16% increase in online sales) and non-financial (i.e. increase in positive mentions) outcomes of the campaign. This view is supported by Vaynerchuk (2011), when he argues that social media engagement mostly involve human interactions (i.e. positive/negative reviews, Word of Mouth), which cannot be calculated using mathematical calculation. Murdough (2009) urge that a ‘social media measurement process’ should have five stages – concept (definie what trying to accomplish), definition (creating an outline of how social platforms could be leveraged to reach and interact with target audience to support objectives), design (lays out specific tactics and venues most appropriate for brand’s active social media presence), deploy ment (focus is on ensuring that what is being seen and transpiring in social venues is what is expected) and optimisation (all the work done in the previous four steps comes together in the form of reporting and insight to evaluate the social program performance). Further, he suggests that the metric use to measure social media success is depending upon firm’s goal. For instance; if the firm goal is to deepen customer relationship, therefore the metric used should be the number of advocates (eg; fan, followers) and number of comment posted. For this reason, practitioners would opt to use customer engagement as their key metric to access the performance of their social media marketing. Such metrics for social media applications include but are not limited to the number of visits, tags, page views, members/fans, impressions, incoming links, impressions-to-interactions ratio, and the average length of time visitors spend on the website. 2.4
Summary
The literature review demonstrates that social media offers tremendous benefits for the company if the right strategies are well prepared and applied. The right selection of social media plaform, content strategy and efficency of customer service are among the most critical aspect that every company must take into high consideration before decision is made to engage with customers in social media. Once the company decides, it would be meaningless if the company does not measuring their campaign performance. Due to difficulty to link the success with financial measure, the use of customer engagement behavior such as number of fan and number of engaging fan are the most commonly proposed by an academic researchers and practitioners, as after all
7
company’s main focus is conversion, which means how well consumers’ involvements on the social media platform affect their buying decisions. Statisics showed in chapter one is an evidance that social media has been widely used by Malaysian for multiple purposes, especially for socializing with friends and family. However, the present social media strategies adopted by the Malaysian Automotive Industry and their performance is not known. Therefore, this paper seeks to answer the following research questions: 1). What kind of social media platform presently used by Malaysian Automotive Industry to engage with the customers/shareholders 2). How regular they update their Facebook content 3). Do their customer service in Facebook play efficiently and 4). Are they succeessful in their Facebook campaign? This paper intends to answer these questions and provide preliminary evidence on the current customer engagement strategy in social media within Malaysian Automotive Industry. 3.0
Methodology
Twenty (out of twenty nine) passenger cars registered with Malaysian Automotive Association were selected for analysis. Data collection were conducted in two stages; First, we content analyze the company’s website to examine the social media platform used for customer engagement. The data was then coded into 1 – if present or 0 – if absence. In stage two, quantitative content analysis again was adopted to empirically investigate the level of customer engagement in their official Facebook page. One month data; July 2015 of all the selected company was retrieved in one day, due to the rapidly changing of social media data. Two coders were then asked to code and analyze the data by using the coding sheet prepared for this study. Four most popular and important metrics to measure level of customer engagement behaviours and their Facebook performance were selected: a. No. of fan : Number of fan who ‘like’ brand’s Facebook b. Total engagement : No. of actual fan who really ‘engage’ and interact with the brand such as ‘liking’, commenting’ and ‘sharing’ brand post with others c. Engagement rate (ER) : Percentage of (Total engagement divided by number of fan) d. Post per month : Total number of post in a month The performance of the company’s customer service was rated by the coders into three categories; excellent, good and poor. The coders used their own judgement based on the number of complaints and queries responded and the tone or language used by the customer service. According to LikeAlyzer.com, Facebook campaign is said to be successfull if enggagement rate exceeds 7%. This study will use this benchmark to determine the succees or failure of Facebook campaign. The agreement between coders was 87%, which is above the minimum average 80% for inter-coders reliability (Lombard et al, 2002; Hayes and Krippendorff, 2007). Therefore, the result of this study was deemed reliable. 4.0
Finding of the study
The result as depicted in Table 2 shows that all the company (analysis made by the car brand) has at least one social media presence, in which Facebook (100%) is the most popular one, followed by Youtube (72%), Twitter (35%), Instagram (20%), LinkedIn (5%) while others is only 15%. The most engage company in social media is Naza Kia
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Malaysia (6 plaforms), after that Nissan, Mercedez Benz and Peugeot (4 platform), while the least engage companies are Suzuki, Renault, Lexus and Mazda with only using Facebook platform. Suprisingly, Honda being one of the most popular and the fourth highest car sales in year 2014 (Malaysia Automotive Association, 2015), only choose to have one platform, Facebook. Average of social media platform used in this industry is three. The result of company’s performance in Facebook is presented in Table 3. Till July 2015, Honda has successfully attract the highest number of fan in Facebook, while Naza Kia in the second and Toyota in the third place. The least popular company is Renault with only be able to generate nineteen thousand fans. Honda, being the most popular company, however, fails in Facebook campaign as they only able to attract 1.52% of their fan to socially engage in their Facebook. As can be seen from the data, only BMW and Mercedez Benz succeeds in their campaign while the rest of the companies far behind the satisfactory level. The most highly engage company in terms of number of post is Suzuki with 27 posts were shared in July, 2015 and the most least engage company is Mazda with only 2 posts shared in that month. Of 20 companies, 17 of them having excellent customer service, 1 (Nissan) was rated good and two (Mercedez and Hyundai) were rated poor in their customer service.
Table 2: Social media plaform used by the selected company (brand) Brand name BMW
FB
TW
YT
9
INS
LN
Other
Total 3
Proton Ford Honda Nissan Toyota Naza Kia Perodua Suzuki Volkswagen Mitshubishi Mercedez Benz Chery Peugeot Renault Citroen Volvo Mazda Hyundai Lexus Total
20 (100%)
2 2 1 4 3 6 2 1 3 2 4 3 4 1 3 3 1 2 1
1 (5%)
3 (15%)
7 (35%)
70 (72%)
4 (20%)
Data as 31 July, 2015 Note: FB – Facebook, TW-Twitter, YT-Youtube, INS-Instagram, LN- LinkedIN, Other-Corporate Blog, Flickr, Google+
Table 3: Company’s performance in Facebook Brand name
No. of fan
Total engagement
ER (%)
Total post
CS
CP
BMW
232K
20,762
8.95
19
E
S
10
Proton 333K 61 0.02 22 E F Ford 71K 397 0.56 12 E F Honda 939K 14,944 1.59 17 E F Nissan 450K 1,541 2.44 14 G F Toyota 621K 2,149 2.81 10 E F Naza Kia 645K 12,778 1.98 14 E F Perodua 144K 1,589 1.10 18 E F Suzuki 222K 1,814 2.93 27 E F Volkswagen 467K 1,446 0.31 17 E F Mitshubishi 349K 2,824 0.81 18 E F Mercedez Benz 214K 22,278 10.41 20 P S Chery 6528 19 0.29 3 E F Peugeot 478K 20,850 4.36 18 E F Renault 19K 879 4.62 10 E F Citroen 103K 497 0.48 10 E F Volvo 155K 3,179 2.05 13 E F Mazda 98k 253 0.26 2 E F Hyundai 97K 167 0.17 5 P F Lexus 207K 6,180 2.99 18 E F Note: ER (Engagement Rate), RR (Response rate), [CS (Customer service): Excellent (E), Good (G), Poor (P) and [CP (Campaign performance) = Fail (F), Success (S)] 5.0
Discussion and suggestion to the managers
There are many interesting conclusion can be made with regard to the results of this study, in which the discussions are divided into the following topic: 5.1
Social media use
All companies in the sample use at least one platform to engage with customers in which Facebook is the most popular platform, not only among Malaysian but within the Automotive Industry as well. The result shows that Malaysian companies in this industry are fully aware the importance use social media and they alert with current technology trend to stay competitive. Hundreds (or, may be thousands) of social media made for free are available in the market, but in the context of small population country like Malaysia, three social media is considered sufficient. The most important thing in social media strategy is not relied on the quantity of the platform use, but on the quality and proactiveness of their strategy. Each social media platform usually attracts a certain group of people, therefore, firms should be active wherever their customers are present (Kaplan and Hainlein, 2010). Therefore, managers should opt to use only platform that most widely use among Malaysian as such Facebook, YouTube and Whatssup (See Table 1 for referrence). Unfortunately, none of the company in the sample uses Whatssup as their option, eventhough Whatssup has been rated as the third most popular platform for socializing in Malaysia. Corporate blog is another significant platform to generate greater engagement and leads that all the company fails to use. Many managers may have uncertainties or misconceptions as to the value of corporate blog. Some may be believe that too much time and effort will be required to effectively implement a corporate blog platform into
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their existing promotional efforts, with little return on investment. However, creating and mainting blog is relatively easy after comfort level is achieved and the results are far-reaching and surprisingly effective. The best way for the company to attract its potential customers is interacting and giving them opportunity to talk about their needs. This is what Starbucks offers at “My Starbucks Idea”, the corporate blog that, far from the most usual concept of “corporate”, gives to their visitors the chance to submit ideas for new drinks, food items, packages, even store designs. Since its launched, more than 100,000 ideas have been submitted by the visitors. People participating at the blog also will be able to vote for ideas submitted by others, in which ideas received highest votes will be developed by Starbucks. The same concept can be implemented by Malaysian Car brands, where the audience should be given a chance in co-creation and product development process, not only they will feel belong to the brands, their ideas might be more innovative and better meets the real customer demand. Another conclusion can be made is that most of the company is moderately active in Facebook. It can be seen on the regularity of the content update, in which all the company did not update their Facebook content daily. The company needs to update the post frequently, in average 1 to 2 posts daily in Facebook to reach optimum number of engagement (SocialBakers, 2011; BufferSocial, 2015). This finding may be one of the factors that contribute to the low level of customer engagement in their Facebook. 5.2
Performance of Facebook campaign
One of the main objectives of social media engagement is to provide better customer service to the customers. A major challenge for social media marketing is to develop appropriate response strategies to negative word of mouth (Hennig-Thurau et al., 2010; Roehm and Tybout, 2006) and respond to customer’s request or complaint satisfactorily and at timely manner, otherwise, they may have negative impacts on online reputation (Pekka, 2010), a firm’s brand image and sales (Corstjens and Umblijs, 2012). Online reputation is ‘a complex interplay between company’s communication and actions, on one hand, and the communication and actions of other stakeholders, on the other hand (Calin Gurau, 2013), and it is determined by other people's responses to those messages (Bunting and Lipski, 2000). The result of this study shows that most of the customer service of the company play efficient role to avoid customer’s frustration. The efficient performance of the customer service proved that the company consistently monitoring their social media, listen and act accordingly on what their customers says about their company, product and services. Car is a hedonic product due to its style, fun and exciting characters. Hedonic products may have an effect on customer’s brand loyalty (Sloot et al, 2005; Kuika and Laukkanen, 2012) as customers seek out pleasurable products and experiences (Holbrook and Hirschman, 1982). It is therefore fair to assume that hedonic brands should enjoy more customer attention, passion and interaction. However, in the case of Malaysia, only BMW and Mercedez are succeeded in Facebook campaign whereas others failed to attract sufficient customer involvement and engagement. Conclusion could not be made for their failure, as we did not analyzed the content of their Facebook, but, assumption that we can suggest are the lacking of their content quality and irrelevant to their audience interest. According to Kunal et al. (2013), choice of the marketing strategy and consistency in communal norms does impact social media effectivess. In social media marketing, content is a core in any success of social media
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campaign and always connected with two strategies; type of message and how the message is delivered (features of the message). Content contains persuasive messages such as entertaining, fun, interactive are effective strategy to attract customer engagement (Yu-Ting et al, 2015; Lisette et al. 2012; Christy and Trcay, 2015). Establishing a social media campaign is more than just posting an update informing people that a new product or service is on sale. Rust et al., (2010) discuss that marketing approach has changed. Firms must realize the important of the customer relationship driven content rather than transactional old-fashioned marketing concept by controlling the customer. It used to be about persuading consumers to buy products by “bombarding” customers with numerous advertisements. Ironically, some of today’s social media marketing campaigns are still driven by the old-fashioned marketing and focus on short-term effect (sales), which is also known as incentive–induced behavior (Dumenco, 2011). Firm must avoid to use social media to simply advertise their products or services. They have to use social media to drive long-term relationship and get them involve in creativity and crowd intelligence activities such as invite customer to co-create, sharing customer experience, tapping customer creativity, giving feedback, quiz and so on. Therefore, we assume that their content strategy is focusing on selling and advertising orientation that made customer bored and dissapear. Furthermore, lack of creativity, excitement, inspiration or persuasive characters that enable their fan to engage and remains loyal. Future research is recommended to confirm this assumption. 6.0
Limitation
This study was relied on a month data (July, 2015), and some company may not fully active in Facebook due to festive season in Malaysia. Repeating the study in longer period is encouraged to generate more precise results. 7.0
Acknowledgement
This study was supported by UTM and MOHE by using grant no. 00M34 8.0
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