Does Social Media Brand Community Membership Translate to Real Sales? A Critical Evaluation of Purchase Behavior by Fans and Non-Fans of a Facebook Fan Page

The emerging social media brand communities provide a good platform for marketers to promote brands to their members. Marketers are devoting time and efforts to building their social media fan pages; however, the elusive question of whether their social media fans exhibit any behavioural loyalty in terms of actual purchase behaviour remains unanswered. Based on the characteristics of social media, we treat social media fan membership as the objective indicator of attitudinal loyalty. This study validates the positive relationship between social media attitudinal loyalty and behavioural loyalty by proposing three models on purchase expenditure, quantity and frequency. We used treatment effects model to account for selection bias problem. Our data for model estimation consist of an apparel retailer brand’s customer transaction data and their Facebook fan page membership data. This study shows that fans of the brand have higher behavioural loyalty than non-fans in terms of all the three purchase behaviour aspects.