Identifying the antecedents and barriers of customers brand engagement on social media in the banking industry

Today, social media creates a unique opportunity for brands to strengthen their relationships with customers. Organizations, by increasing the brand engagement of their customers on the social media, could create value through interaction and deep and sustained contribution with them, and also they could maintain and strengthen their customers' loyalty. Accordingly, the present study seeks to identify the most important antecedents and barriers of customer-brand engagement on social media in the banking industry. In order to achieve this goal, in-depth interviews were conducted with customers whom following one or more banks on social media and its data analysis was performed by using content analysis method. The results showed that the most important antecedents affecting customer motivation to engage with a banking brand on social media include three parts: individual (reward, entertainment, information, curiosity, brand engagement and social advantages), organizational (brand reputation, brand popularity, Service experience, information, reliability and content quality) and media (user-friendliness, security, quality, capabilities and popularity of media) and at the personal level (lack of interest, lack of personal skills, negative mentality and attitude), organizational (weakness in Promotion, poor content production), and contextual factors (environmental barriers and media constraints) are important barriers to customer engagement.