Investigating the role of social networking users in attracting and retaining customers

Social networks have become important tools for the social marketing of a company. This makes new challenges for big companies to absorb customers. According to some theories, the comments of the social networks’ users attract and maintain the customer, play a direct role in user participation, and make company products active and up-to-date in social networks. In this research, data were gathered from ۲۹۳ reliable questionnaires from Instagram users and were analyzed through structural equations(SEM). Also,Cronbach’s alpha and factor load were used to evaluate the reliability and validity of the questionnaire and results showed the proposed questionnaire acceptability. According to the confidence degree of each hypothesis, the hypotheses were demonstrated and the experimental results showed that users comments have a positive effect on the attraction and maintenance of customers in social networks. This study presents a practical guide for companies to cause them to pay more attention to users’ comments and increase the stability of the company’s social networks.

Keywords:

social networks , customer engagement , user comments , Customer Relationship Management , Structural Equation Model , Descriptive Analysis.