Social Media Influencing Customer Loyalty

摘要

With emergence of social networking, marketers are keen to utilize the best possible benefits of the social media to gain competitive advantage. The rise of social media has altered the way people communicate, interact and most importantly the purchase decisions. As more people use social media, business must use social medja both target their audience and increase productivity. However, the things that make social media so attractive to users are the personalization, the ease of access, the ease with which information is shared and the real time nature of the medium. This encourages the marketers to explore the social media at their best. This study thus aimed to investigate how social media influences the customer loyalty. The study reports that the social media directly influence the customer loyalty and have an indirect influence through several intermediating variables. Those variables include customer relationship, brand awareness, positive word of mouth, and new ideas. The intermediating variables apart from direct influence on customer loyalty are revealed to have considerable positive role in mediating the relationship between Social Media and customer loyalty. The study also furnishes a conceptual model showing the relationship of the variables and their impact making it more lucid for the researchers and practitioners.