Social Media Engagement and Consumer Patronage: The Moderating Role of Business Operation and Competition Intensity
Journal
Information Systems Frontiers
Journal Volume
28
Start Page
229
End Page
247
ISSN
1387-3326
1572-9419
Date Issued
2026
Author(s)
Abstract
This study leverages unique restaurant-level panel data from Facebook Business Pages, Yelp.com, and Walkscore.com to examine how social media engagement influences consumers’ patronage behavior. Drawing on the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) and related information processing and digital marketing research, we also investigate how contextual and environmental factors moderate this relationship. The results show that Facebook Likes have a significant positive effect on Check-ins, a proxy for consumers’ offline patronage. This effect is stronger for chain restaurants than for independent ones and is amplified in highly competitive markets. Additional analyses using panel vector autoregression (VAR) models address potential endogeneity arising from reverse causality between Likes and Check-ins. This study advances the social media engagement literature by highlighting how Likes influence consumers’ real-world patronage beyond transactional and financial outcomes. It also provides actionable insights for social media and digital marketing practitioners seeking to leverage engagement metrics to enhance business performance.
Subjects
Consumer engagement
Social media
Social media strategy
User-generated content
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Type
journal article