Development and evaluation of two-sided customer and business-oriented Ontology in the field of customer engagement in social networks

Nowadays businesses by identifying the components affecting the dimensions of customer engagement and mining the data that are produced by customers and with suitable marketing activities can attract more and more customers and eventually have more useful and updated marketing. This research “Ontology of customer engagement in social networks from the perspective of customer needs and business requirements” uses a systematic review of the literature and content analysis that is presented in two main dimensions: “Engagement components from the perspective of customers” and the classification of customer engagement sub-components from a functional and content perspective of business as “Engagement components from a business point of view”. In such a way that a two-sided relationship between the customer and business active in social networks is presented. The layer of customer’s perspective is presented in three layers: “Behavioral”, “Cognitive” and “Emotional”. These components measure the impact of focusing on 30 sub-components of the activities of active businesses and other customers in social networks on customer engagement. Moreover, the layer of a business’s perspective is categorized into 7 sub-groups: “advertisements based on functional value”, “content”, “aesthetics and customization”, “social-psychological”, “temporal and contextual”, “interaction” and “technology”. The proposed ontology has been evaluated using survey research with help of users’ and customers’ opinions on social networks. In this step, by purposeful sampling and using an online questionnaire, the components from a business perspective as a common measurement index between the two existing perspectives were evaluated. The sub-components of the proposed ontology were accepted based on Friedman’s test. The results of statistical analysis show that its layers are homogeneous with 95% confidence and the layer “advertisements based on functional value” has the greatest impact on increasing customer engagement.