IMPACT OF HUMAN VALUES ON BRAND PROMOTION AND ENGAGEMENT IN SOCIAL MEDIA

Abstract

Companies regard customer engagement activities on social media, such as sharing, content creation, and brand reviews, as more useful than merely "liking" or viewing brand content. Research indicates that consumer-generated or shared branded content on social media can enhance brand exposure and loyalty more effectively than mere "likes" (Adweek, 2013). Multinational corporations are progressively prioritizing the stimulation of consumer-generated content (e.g., Coca-Cola #shareacoke and Apple #ShotoniPhone; 
Sprout Index, 2018). Nonetheless, marketing professionals have only lately started to comprehend social media audiences that participate in these activities (Adweek, 2018). This study asserts that human values can be utilized to discover and segment audiences for valuable brand actions on social media. Three online questionnaires were administered to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram users aged 18 to 34 on Amazon Mechanical Turk (N = 491). The correlation between the values of social media users and their reported activities on these platforms was analyzed. Research demonstrates that the human values analyzed (conservation, self-enhancement, openness to change, and self-transcendence) are substantial motivators of meaningful brand-related social media engagement. Companies must engage conservation-oriented consumers to stimulate brand sharing and creation initiatives. Companies ought to focus on conservation-oriented users for promotional sharing, self-enhancement-oriented users for disseminating instructional content and composing product reviews, and change-oriented users for user-generated content. Businesses should emphasize their corporate social responsibility initiatives, as a negative correlation exists between users' self-transcendence principles and brand actions. Recommendations are offered on how brands might align with users' values in their social media marketing to encourage the sharing of branded content and content creation.