Abstract
•Social messengers like WeChat are the new frontier for organizations to engage online stakeholders.•Users who see Wechat as an indispensable part of their life tend to exhibit a deeper level of engagement with organizations via Wechat.•Publics’ engagement with organizations on social messengers is also driven by the perceived private setting of social messengers.•Public engagement via social messengers positively influences relationship outcomes of trust, satisfaction, and commitment.
Mobile-based social messengers have overtaken social networking sites as the new frontier for organizations to engage online stakeholders. This study provides one of the earliest empirical investigations on the antecedents and relational outcomes of pubic engagement with companies via WeChat—one of the world’s most popular social messaging apps. Publics’ social messenger dependency and privacy perception of the medium are found to effectively drive public engagement, which in turn enhances organization-public relationships. Strategic guidelines based on the study findings are provided.
