Antecedents and an Outcome of Customer Engagement with Hotel Brand Community on Facebook

The purpose of this study is to examine customer-brand experience and customer involvement as two drivers of customer engagement (CE) and investigate brand relationship quality as a major outcome of CE with a hotel's Facebook brand community. It is essential for hotel marketers to understand more about how to engage customers with brand communities embedded in Facebook, to understand what the antecedents of such engagements are, and to recognize what outcomes they can gain from engaged customers. This article adopts structural equation modeling and analyzes data collected from a sample of 347 Facebook users who are hotel customers. The results of the empirical research confirm the significant effect of the two antecedents on CE and the role of engaging customers in building customer-brand relationships. Furthermore, CE with hotel brand communities embedded in Facebook has a mediating effect on the path from customer-brand experience to brand relationship quality.