Brands communication on social media and user engagement : A Qualitative study

Abstract

This research exploratory tries to understand how consumers perceive brand content in social media in the Moroccan context. The aim, more specifically, is to identify the main content that draws the user’s attention and better understand the set of motivations and content categories that lead the user’s engagement. The review of the literature allowed us to focus on digital communication, of which content and engagement are the main pillars. Drawing on prior studies, and uses and gratification theory, social media content that influences engagement has been conceptualized into three main categories of rational, interactional, and transactional. A qualitative survey through semi-structured interviews were conducted. We focused on the study of the brand pages of the telecommunications sector in Morocco, namely Maroc Telecom, Orange, and Inwi, the choice of this sector was justified mainly by the number of active Internet users pursuing these pages on social networks, and the diversity of content published on their pages. We used Nvivo software for the analysis of our transcripts. The results allowed us to deduce that interactional and transactional content leads to a high level of engagement (comments and shares), more than a passive engagement which is limited to observation or likes. and does not require a high effort on the part of the user, on the other hand, the informational/ rational content is not too sought after by our respondents and does not meet their expectations. The results are presented and discussed in this article.