The role of social media in building brand equity : a study on the Facebook pages of the airlines sector in Egypt

Abstract EN

Airlines are continuously searching for better approaches to engage with their current and potential passengers.

Social networking sites with its interactive nature have allowed these corporations to engage with customers in a two-way online dialogue.

This article aims at investigating the role of the content that are created by airlines on their Facebook pages as well as the content that is posted by passengers in enhancing customer-based brand equity and purchase intention in the airline industry.

A quantitative study was adopted for data collection through questionnaires.

An online questionnaire was posted on a number of Facebook pages of three Egyptian airlines.

Testing of the proposed conceptual framework was performed using the partial least squared structural equation modeling approach (PLS-SEM).

The results indicated that the content that is created by the airlines only affected the brand awareness component of brand equity.

As expected, the findings showed that the content that is posted by the passengers on the Facebook pages of the airlines significantly influenced all dimensions of brand equity.

Finally, the findings confirmed the significant impact of these four dimensions on passengers' purchase intention.

The paper contributes to online marketing field by examining the roles that different forms of social media content have in enhancing passengers' relationships with the airlines.

Also, it underscores the critical value of user-generated content on social media in affecting passengers' opinions about the airline companies.

Moreover, it provides some guidelines for airlines to fully utilize the power of social media marketing.