A Study of Personality Traits affecting Facebook Engagement: A case study of popular Facebook pages in Thailand

Abstract

Nowadays social media has become an essential tool that marketers cannot ignore. It was employed to develop customer engagement, monitor customers’ feedback, and eventually increase company’s profit. The aim of this study was to examine two out of “Five-Factor Model” (FFM) of personality traits which consist of extraversion and openness to experience. Individuals with these two personality traits tend to interact not only with the close-knit group of people, but also the larger group of unknown people to satisfy their self-interest. This could be reflected in the form of liking and commenting behaviors in Facebook. From marketers’ perspectives, this would help to increase the engagement level between the customers and the brand. Therefore, this research was conducted to demonstrate the linkage between the above mentioned variables. Online questionnaire was used to collect the data from 261 respondents. It was designated to those heavy users of Facebook who considered surfing Facebook as their daily activities. The data was then analyzed by descriptive and correlation analysis. The result of this study proved the validity and reliability of the conceptual framework. The findings indicated that openness to experience has positive relationship with broadcasting interaction. While broadcasting also related to both Facebook’s likes and comments. These results shed the light for company’s management concerning to their social media strategies that they choose for their target customers. They may also employ the visual information strategy that could be more effective in terms of the content communication (Mitchell and Olsen, 1981).