Synergies between Social Media Features and User Engagement to Enhance Online Brand Visibility - A Conceptual Model

Abstract

Organizations today are fast realizing the impact of social media as a significant business driver for capitalizing the advantages on certain key strategic issues like user engagement and brand visibility. Integrating social media characteristics is one of the key differentiators for enhancing online brand visibility. Though a lot of research has been made on the social media usability and user engagement, the uniqueness of this research paper is the identification of synergies between the features of social media and user engagement to enhance online brand visibility. In this paper a conceptual model is explained by developing a social media-user engagement matrix to explain the synergies. The matrix integrates four parameters of User Engagement namely Involvement, Interaction, Intimacy and Influence with four Social Media characteristics namely Content, Relationship, Value and Structure to bring out the essence of interoperability. This paper has identified and listed certain metrics for measuring the online brand visibility. We believe that the outcome of this paper will make significant contribution to the existing body of knowledge by uniquely identifying and explaining the ‘social media-user engagement synergy’ and also listing appropriate metrics for measuring online brand visibility.

Keywords: Web 2.0, Social Media, User Engagement, Online Brand Visibility, Synergy-Matrix