Vlogger's engagement via facebook: A case study of UK beauty Vlogger Zoella

Copyright © The Authors, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Recent years have witnessed an increasing amount of video blog (vlog) production and consumption. Famous video bloggers (vloggers) can gain millions of subscribers and substantial income from their channel on the video-sharing social media site YouTube. Facebook is a social media site for user-generated content (UGC) exchange, which has been widely used by vloggers to connect with their audience in addition to video products. In addition to YouTube, vloggers' uses of Facebook pages help them to develop "engagement", which is defined as the connections between consumer and companies, beyond product consumption. "Engagement" benefits providers by building a close, long-standing relationship with the consumer, leading to marketing advantages such as customer loyalty and positive word of mouth recommendations. Facebook has been proved an effective platform for firms to achieve engagement via existing and potential customers. Previous researchers have already developed frameworks for firms to achieve customer engagement via Facebook usage; however, how vloggers use the site to engage their audiences has rarely been explored. This research paper explores the question "How do video bloggers (vloggers) use Facebook to achieve audience engagement?", by performing a case study on the Facebook presence of UK beauty vlogger Zoe Sugg (Zoella). It first reviews existing literature and identifies factors used on Facebook for achieving customer engagement. Then the author conducted a qualitative investigation by observing activities on Zoe's Facebook page, to identify whether the elements of customer engagement exist in her social messages. Based on the result, this research argues that vloggers could use interaction, selfpresentation, information offers, topical messages, entertainment, and visual stimulus to engage fans on Facebook pages. The research aims to fill the gap in the academic research field between social media engagement and vlogging. The results could help us build, in future study, a framework to understand possible behaviours on vloggers' social media channels that could enhance engagement.