Exploring the factors of social media communication and their impact on online corporate brand image

Abstract

In the past two decades, social media has transformed the way marketers communicate with their customers. Customers have moved from traditional media to new media to gather information. The purpose of this paper is to explore the factors of social media communication and its impact on online corporate brand image. The descriptive study uses exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and stepwise regression on data collected from 651 social media users. The study extracted three factors in firm-created content and two factors in user-generated content. Further, the study showed that social media interactivity and user comments have the strongest impact on the online brand image of any company.