Investigating the Impact of Integration in the Social Media based Brand Community on Consumer Behaviors

In the present day, the growing spread of communication tools and increasing the internet penetration have caused the impact of traditional to decline and the impact of social media to increase. The emergence of social media and their unique features have led companies to pay special attention to these media as a platform to establish long-term communication with customers. One of the most important tools used by companies on social media to communicate with customers is social media based brand community. The aim of this study is to investigate the effect of integration in social media based brand community on customer satisfaction and brand evangelism via brand trust. For this purpose, an online questionnaire was designed and sent to a number of followers of different brands pages on Instagram. At the end 265 questionnaires received from the respondents were used. Collected data were analyzed by structural equation modeling method and partial least squares approach, and the software used in the research was Smart PLS2. The results of the analysis indicated that integration in social media based brand community had a positive and significant effect on brand trust. The results also demonstrated that brand trust had a positive and significant effect on customer satisfaction and brand evangelism in social media based brand community. In addition, the positive and significant effect of customer satisfaction on brand evangelism was confirmed. Finally, the mediating role of customer satisfaction in the relationship between brand trust and brand evangelism was found to be meaningful.