The Influence of Personal and Social-Interactive Engagement in Social TV Web Sites

Traditional retail and online brands seek new ways to build a platform to enable customers to connect with one another and encourage consumer engagement. The purpose of the present work is to understand how social media is transforming consumer engagement and redefining commercial marketing strategies using video on the Web, mobile devices, and traditional TV. We develop and validate a conceptual model of how experiential personal engagement and social-interactive engagement influence active and passive behavior in the emerging form of television that supports and integrates social interaction. The paper describes how personal engagement with the content and social-interactive engagement (resulting from the perceived sense of community, intrinsic enjoyment, and participation experience) differentially influence both active and passive behavior. We test hypotheses using structural equation modeling with survey data from a sample of 814 U.S. and European social TV users. Invariance analyses show the different effect of gender and level of interaction provided (social features) by the social TV Web site. Implications for contextual advertising and social commerce are discussed.