Customer pre-participatory social media drivers and their influence on attitudinal loyalty within the retail banking industry: A multi-group analysis utilizing social exchange theory

Abstract

Social media pervades everyday life and firms need to understand what consumer traits antedate participation over these channels. Utilizing social exchange theory (SET), this study seeks to determine what factors precede SET's cost-benefit analysis of social media participation along with these factors' influence on attitudinal loyalty. Important antecedents to this cost-benefit analysis for social media participation are online interaction propensity (OIP), participation attitude and trust. Further, demographic (age, gender, income) and social media page factors (perceived page size and page visit frequency) are identified as potential precursors to customers' cost-benefit analysis towards social media participation. A sample of 482 U.S. banking customers was collected via an online survey. The results found that OIP and trust had direct statistically significant effects on attitudinal loyalty and participation attitude's effect was fully mediated by trust. Age, gender and page visit frequency facets exhibited no differences between groups whilst income (with higher income groups displaying higher levels of loyalty) and page size groups (smaller page sizes demonstrated greater loyalty) demonstrated differing effects on attitudinal loyalty. The study contributes to knowledge and practice by extending particular pre-SET traits in social media to a U.S. retail banking context. The study also furthers academic and managerial capabilities for segmentation analysis' and explicating connections between pre-participatory influences and attitudinal loyalty.