Building a tribe on Instagram: How User-generated and Firm-created Content can drive brand evangelism and fidelity

The social media revolution has significantly transformed marketing plans and practices in the business world. Firm-Created Content (FCC) and User-Generated Content (UGC) serve as critical social media communication tools for brands to connect and build relationships with customers. This study investigates the influence of FCC and UGC on affective commitment, brand evangelism, and fidelity. Drawing on the Stimulus-Organism-Response (SOR) model, this study aims to explore the impact of FCC and UGC on affective commitment, which, in turn, mediates the relationships between these social media communication tools (FCC and UGC), brand evangelism and fidelity. The research, focusing on a coffee-shop chain’s FCC and UGC on Instagram, utilizing structural equation modeling to analyze data from a sample of 341 Instagram users in the USA who are Starbucks customers. The findings reveal that FCC and UGC are positively and significantly related to brand evangelism and fidelity. Furthermore, the results suggest that affective commitment mediates the relationship between FCC, UGC, brand evangelism and fidelity, supporting the hypotheses concerning the indirect relationships between social media communication tools, brand evangelism and fidelity.