Factors that influence students’ engagement with the Facebook page of a selected University

M.Com. (Business Management)Abstract: Customer engagement creates an environment in which the customer can interact directly with the brand. Customer engagement is an important method that marketers apply to retain customers by creating loyalty and positive word of mouth, and this is also true in higher education. As competition within university institutions increases, engaging with students provides the university with direct access to students’ concerns, wants and expectations about the university. There are many social media platforms, which students can use to engage with their university, and Facebook is a popular tool used by this generation. On daily basis students spend a great deal of time on their Facebook accounts and they follow brands that are interesting, informative and fun. It is therefore important for universities to understand the factors that would increase students’ need to engage with the university’s Facebook page. These factors will assist in providing an analysis, which the university can use on their Facebook page to encourage engagement, increase loyalty, positive word of mouth and a satisfactory university experience for the students. A quantitative research study through surveys was conducted with the third year Faculty of Management students at the University of Johannesburg (UJ). Third years were targeted as they had more experience with the UJ Facebook page than other year groups. A non-probability quota sampling method was employed, which is a combination of judgement and convenience to access a representative sample from all eight departments in the specific faculty. From the 600 questionnaire distributed 399 could be used for analysis to achieve the main objective to determine the factors that influence student engagement with the UJ Facebook page. The two main methods used to analyse the data were Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Structural Equation Modelling (SEM). EFA was employed to group similar variables, test and verify the scale construction, reduce the information and ultimately to simplify the data for further analysis. SEM was employed to test the proposed casual relationships relating to the independent variables (perceived ease of use, critical mass, capability, and perceived playfulness), the intervening variables (perceived usefulness and intention to use) the moderate variable (trustworthiness) and the dependent variables (actual use/customer engagement) of the UJ Facebook page..