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(i.e., in the forms of like, share, view, comment or retweet), whether social media content should be differentiated between business-to-
business and business-to-consumer interactions, and what are the successful social media content strategies. But despite that, based on SWOT
analysis, Nature’s Palette lack of interaction in social media causing need for brand awareness among beauty and wellness markets in social
media.
In the context of Nature’s Palette, considering its years in the industry and the numbers of its followers on social media accounts, their social
media content has not brought positive outcomes from their consumer engagement behavior. It is because they practice informative content
rather than keeping it interactive with their consumers as Eigenraam et al. (2021) stated that it is pivotal for reasons of stimulating consumers
online engagement and provide businesses with the importance of competitive, financial, and positioning benefits. Consequently, it is crucial
to consider interactive social engagement for social media advertisement since it could attract customer’s responsiveness only if they are
engaged in the media vehicle (Voorveld et al., 2018 as cited in Paramita et al., 2021). Not to mention, Nature’s Palette also admits that they
lack leads and conversion through their social media posts, unable to stimulate the consumer’s purchase intention despite their consistent
posting and luxurious image on social media.
Nowadays, the competition among local skincare brands is quite fierce. A research by Ishak et al. (2020) stated that Malaysian local cosmetics
and toiletries market’s worth is now estimated around RM3 billion with 13 percent annual growth rate on par with the blooming of home-
grown beauty brands. Therefore, it is important for Nature’s Palette to engage more with customers through their postings in social media
which can encourage their followers to share content or feedback that can helps in spreading word-of-mouth and building awareness
(Lepkowska-White et al., 2019). User-generated content (UGC) also enables the collection of real-time data that deliver predictive and
prescriptive models in order to help in faster and relevant decision making as well as forecast business outcomes (Sloan and Quan-Haase,
2017; Ho et al., 2020 as cited in Siti-Nabiha et al., 2021). These aforementioned benefits contribute to strengthening business competitiveness,
though currently is not being practiced by Nature’s Palette. Hence, this study will focus on the vividness and interactivity of social media
content to see its effect on consumer engagement behavior by the number of likes, comments, shares, views and retweets.
1.3 RESEARCH QUESTIONS
This study lists three main research questions;
RQ1: How does the vividness of social media content affects consumers’ social media engagement behavior?
RQ2: How does the interactivity of social media content affects consumers’ social media engagement behavior?
RQ3: What type of social media platform give the most impact on consumers’ social media engagement behavior?
1.4 RESEARCH OBJECTIVES
Based on the aforementioned statements, the following lists the specific objectives;
RO1: To determine the importance of social media vividness on consumer engagement behavior.
RO2: To investigate the importance of social media interactivity on consumer engagement behavior.
RO3: To examine the importance of the selection of social media platform on consumer engagement behavior.
1.5 SIGNIFICANCE OF RESEARCH
By analyzing the social media postings made by two local skincare brands in Malaysia, this research adds on the current understanding of
the selection of social media platform and content format in terms of the vividness and interactivity. This study provides a clear
comprehension of social media content format role in encouraging customer’s social media engagement behavior on beauty and wellness
industry. The findings of this study will directly benefit marketers or small business owners of skincare brands in selecting the most engaging
social media platform and content strategies. Specifically, this study will help Nature’s Palette in addressing their main problems referring
to the (i) lack of consumers’ engagement and (ii) lack of leads and conversions through their social media postings with the aim of
developing consumers’ social media engagement through the behavior of liking, commenting, sharing, viewing, and retweeting. Furthermore,
a detailed presentation employing descriptive content analysis method to evaluate social media postings involved in this research may guides
further studies to employ an alternative methodology in the beauty and wellness industry. This study also be able to helps future researchers
to comprehend critical areas in social media content that insufficiently addressed by past researchers on the topic of social media vividness,
social media interactivity, types of social media platform, and consumer engagement behavior.
1.6 SCOPE OF STUDY
With the increase in the number of social media users and its use in delivering beneficial insights, there has been a corresponding increase
in the number of businesses using social media as a medium to connect with their customers. Whilst the contribution of social media in
building up the engagement between businesses and customers have been well documented, the effect of social media content on customer
engagement is mostly unknown (Shahbaznezhad et al., 2021). In view of this circumstances, this study examines the role of social media
platform and content format on consumers’ social media engagement behavior. The scope of this study is limited to collecting the dataset
from the postings made by the two most followed Malaysian skincare brands in their social media platforms specifically Facebook, Instagram,
and Twitter. The data collection period was three months, from August until October 2021. Nonetheless, this study will not
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