Exploring interactive communication using social media

Abstract

Engaging consumers in interactive marketing communication is instrumental in business–customer relationships building and development. Social media enables consumers to initiate marketing messages and gain growing control in the communication process due to its enhanced interactivity features. This study investigates whether communication between businesses and their social media users is interactive and how interactive it is. It also attempts to determine what types of messages are more likely to result in interactive communication. The findings reveal that businesses are attempting functional interactivity while individual users are increasingly securing a control to achieve contingent interactivity. Businesses are adopting a consumer-centric approach in designing and executing marketing communication messages to achieve interactivity though significant variance is established between businesses as measured by Interactivity Performance Matrix. Challenges remain for businesses as to how to engage their customers by utilizing the interactivity features of social media to facilitate relationships formulation and development.

Keywords:

• relationship marketing
• communication
• interactivity
• consumer-centric approach
• social media

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviews and the editor in chief of this special issue for their constructive comments. The authors' thanks also go to the five students in Swinburne University of Technology, who are Wesley Robertson, Bo Huang, Jiabei Liu, Ignatius J. Soegeng, and Aaron Yar Lun Wong, for undertaking the tasks of coding and categorizing the themes of posts. Their hard work and commitment is highly appreciated.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.