Consumer Engagement in Social Media: A Systematic Literature Review of Surveys and Experiments

Over the last decade, social media has become a ubiquitous platform for brands and influencers to bolster the reach and impact of their content, aided by customer interactions such as likes, shares, and comments. In recent years, a growing number of academic research from various disciplines examined social media engagement (SM-Engagement) primarily based on secondary data analysis by scrapping data from different social media platforms. Although this kind of research is very useful for observing the patterns in the real world, it fails to unpack the drivers of SM-Engagement. Following the PRISMA protocol, this systematic literature review aims to synthesize and combine the experimental and survey research to identify the variables and methods explored in SM-Engagement and the future research directions. By analyzing 58 academic articles consisting of 46 experiments and 40 surveys, the current review proposes a taxonomy of antecedents, mechanisms, and consequences. This review ends up with the assertion that SM-Engagement is an umbrella term encompassing a whole family of cognitive, affective, and behavioral responses representing how the audiences interact over social media.