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This study examines some pertinent individual-level factors and consequences of consumers' continuous social media brand engagement (SMBE) practices. Further, this study examines the moderating effect of other-efficacy to deepen the understanding.

Online survey data collected from 785 respondents, through a convenience sampling technique on Facebook, was analyzed through structural equation (SEM) modeling with AMOS 23.0.

The findings suggest that compatibility with lifestyle, perceived information quality and escapism, which significantly drive consumers' continuous engagement with brands on social media. However, perceived enjoyment does not. Other-efficacy duly moderates consumers' continuous SMBE practices. While continuous SMBE significantly drives consumer-based brand equity (CBBE), continuous SMBE does not have any significant relationship with consumers' subjective well-being (SWB).

This study reports robust findings on the effects of individual-level factors that drive consumers' continuous SMBE practices. However, the study only focused on Facebook brand pages. This is a limitation for generalizability of results because the research did not take a holistic view of all types of social media.

The research suggests a need for managers to project their brands and share relevant and stimulating information throughout their continuous SMBE with consumers to build strong consumer–brand relationships. Managers should also engage consumers with interesting social media messages as well as both informative and transformative creative strategies to excite them. This will further give consumers a reason to continuously interact with the brand on social media platforms.

This study is one of the very few works to tease out pertinent factors that drive consumers' continuous SMBE practices. The paper integrates the consumer-level factors and moderating effects of other-efficacy through the lens of Social Cognitive Theory (SCT) and Uses and Gratification Theory (UGT) to make a significant contribution to the SMBE literature.

This research aims to extend brand relationship theory to the domain of online gaming by augmenting the understanding of the role played by fantasy state in digital game in impacting gamers' immersive relationships with digital game brands. In this quest, the research examines how fantasy state in game (FSG) creates game brand immersion (GBI) through the mediation of emotional game brand attachment (EGBA) and the roles of individual's need for escapism (NE) and anxious attachment style (AAS) in moderating the aforementioned relationships.

The research employs a pre-test followed by two quantitative studies. Quantitative data were analyzed using the PROCESS macro.

Results from Study 1 illustrate that perceived fantasy in game generates EGBA, which, in turn, predicts GBI. Further, Study 2 establishes that the effect of fantasy in game on EGBA is moderated by gamer's NE. The moderating effect of NE is moderated by individual's AAS.

Value of the study lies in extending consumer–brand relationship theory to digital gaming domain which enhances the understanding of how fantasy state in digital game can lead to GBI and the roles played by individual personality characteristics like escapism motivation and AAS in the process.

This paper aims to shed novel light to further the ongoing debate about the relationship between traditional sports and eSports by gathering empirical evidence on the role that eSports play on the consumption of traditional sports (i.e. live matches at the Stadium, TV matches spectating, merchandise or sponsor purchase), in the peculiar context of soccer.

An extensive literature review on both sports and eSports consumption has informed the creation of a novel dataset through the design and administration of a structured questionnaire to Italian citizens 18+. Questions were about eSports and soccer consumption, information-seeking behaviour and psychometric factors. All constructs have been measured against validated scales. A total of 279 high-quality responses have been analysed through a prediction model based on regression trees in the Machine Learning domain.

Results show that soccer consumption is predicted by the degree of vicarious achievement (positive effect), the degree of playing sport-related eSports (positive effect) and the degree of playing non-sport-related eSports (negative effect). Vertical analyses have been on sub-dimensions of soccer consumption (attending live matches at the Stadium, spectating TV matches, buying merchandise or sponsors’ products).

To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to offer empirical evidence to bridge two main limitations: the lack of studies about the eSports-soccer consumptions relationship and the reduction of soccer consumption as just Stadium attendance. Our results have both theoretical and practical implications.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the level of social media use among students, and the way in which it affects their performance and attitude when used in the classroom in Saudi Arabia. The study explores students' attitudes to using social media to perform activities in the classroom and in their future careers.

A convergent mixed methods design was adopted, administering an online survey to a sample of 622 university students and conducting interviews with 20 students.

The results revealed that the relationship between the level of a student's social media usage and GPA (Grade Point Average) was negatively correlated. Moreover, the students with a high level of social media usage generally reported a highly positive attitude towards using social media in classroom activities. Finally, the students' level of social media usage was found to predict their attitude towards performing classroom activities using social media.

This study has implications for both theory and practice. For example, the findings confirm the ways in which social media are deployed, according to uses and gratification theory. In particular, social media are used by Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University students for escapism, social integration and interaction, establishing personal identity, and meeting affective and cognitive needs. Meanwhile, the theoretical implications of this study are that new dimensions and social media terms can be added to the assumptions of uses and gratification theory. For example, virtual tolerance corresponds to escapism, virtual communication corresponds to integration and social interaction, virtual problems can be matched with personal identity and affective needs, and virtual information corresponds to cognitive needs.

On a practical level, the results could be useful for students, teachers, educational policymakers and society. The results would show students how high social media usage could have a negative impact on their performance. Therefore, they should control their usage by managing their time, for example, via time management apps, if necessary. In particular, students could use social media in their learning and to develop their skills. A positive attitude among students, with regard to using social media in classroom activities, should correspondingly increase teachers' use of social media in the teaching process. This implies the expected benefits for teachers of using social media to teach and communicate with students. In addition, policymakers need to use social media as a means of reaching those population segments who display high social media usage, and who are unlikely to use traditional media to connect with those who formulate policy.

It is important to consider that high levels of social media use have a tendency to affect users' health, causing neck and back pain and psychological issues, for example, stress and depression. This points to a pressing need for society's institutions to raise public awareness of the disadvantages of high social media usage.

This study could serve as a useful source of information for faculty members seeking to integrate social media into their curricula. It could also encourage students to activate social media in their learning and communication with teachers and peers, while at the same time reducing their non-academic social media usage. This study provides a scale for measuring students' social media usage and attitudes to undertaking classroom activities via social media in the Saudi context. The scale is validated through adaptation of the scales developed by Sahin (2018) and Kitchakarn (2016).

Drawing on the social learning theory, the purpose of this paper is to examine the antecedents and consequences of users’ excessive online social gaming. Specifically, the authors develop a model to propose that observational learning and reinforcement learning mechanisms together determine excessive online social gaming, which further foster adverse consequences.

The model is empirically validated by a longitudinal survey among users of a popular online social game: Arena of Valor. The empirical data are analyzed using component-based structural equation modeling approach.

The empirical results offer two key findings. First, excessive online social gaming is determined by observational learning factors, i.e. social frequency and social norm, and reinforcement learning factors, i.e. perceived enjoyment and perceived escapism. Second, excessive online social gaming leads to three categories of adverse consequences: technology-family conflict, technology-work conflict and technology-person conflict. Meanwhile, technology-family conflict and technology-work conflict further foster technology-person conflict.

This study contributes to the literature by developing a nomological framework of excessive online social gaming and by extending the social learning theory to excessive technology use.

The purpose of this paper is to explore and test certain assumptions concerning the role of the media in its coverage of the Olympic Games, US men's and women's basketball in particular, and its perceived impact on brand image of the athletes' performance from a fan's motivational and financial perspective.

Uses and gratifications theory and sport fan motivation scales were used to identify potential impacts of media coverage and branding on athletic performance. Based on a study of 143 working professionals that identified themselves as Olympic sport fans in the Pittsburgh, PA metropolitan area, several hypotheses were tested.

The most to least important factor-based constructs found from a PCA (Principal Components Analysis)/factor analysis included competitiveness, fan commitment, media connections, media impacts, demographics and financial impacts. When using the construct athletic performance at the Olympic level as the dependent variable, results suggested that competitiveness, media connections and fan commitment were significant for males only, while only media connections for significant for females. Males were found to be more player-centric than females, willing to be more focused on the competitive nature of the Olympic Games and to dedicate more money for such activities.

Focusing on Olympic Games and associated athletes' competitive nature opens a unique perspective from fan's gender perspective.

The purpose of this research is to extend theoretical knowledge of key variables and their interactions that impact the persuasiveness of online influencers. The study explores the interactions between influencer gender, follower gender, influencer physical attractiveness, influencer product-match and influencer-follower homophily on persuasiveness of influencer product promotions. Although the extant literature shows the persuasive impact of attractiveness, product-match, gender and homophily, less is known about the interactions of these variables with each other and the gender of the influencer and his or her followers. These gaps in the literature are explored.

The study is a scenario-based experiment where respondents were randomly assigned to cells where influencer attractiveness and product-match were manipulated. The variables of homophily and respondent gender were measured and recorded, respectively. The data were collected through an online survey done through Qualtrics.

The findings show that for female influencers, homophily felt by their followers is a dominant persuasive factor, which tends to supersede the variables of attractiveness and product-match. For male influencers, homophily is an incremental persuasive variable. That is, homophily, attractiveness and product-match interact such that persuasiveness is highest when all three variables are strong.

Limitations are that the authors used a student sample and a hypothetical scenario-based experiment. Theoretical implications are interesting in that the authors have results which add to theory on the factors that make an online influencer more persuasive. Specifically, the authors contribute by extending theoretical knowledge about the interactions of key variables that influence the impact of online influencers.

For a manager marketing products using influencers, it is very important to stress homophily cues for female influencers more than other variables. However, for male influencers, product knowledge or match, homophily and attractiveness all need to work simultaneously to maximize influencer persuasiveness.

One needs to understand that physical attractiveness and perceived homophily with the influencer have significant influence and persuasiveness, regardless of product or service. Hence, there needs to be social responsibility in what is advertised and promoted, given that followers may be persuaded by influencers no matter what the product or service is.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first study that explores the persuasiveness of online influencers from the perspective of the variable interactions described above.

The purpose of this study was to explore possible types of brand proximity based on respective psychological causal antecedents, and also to uncover possible marking outcomes of brand proximity.

Data were collected from young adult respondents through semi-structured depth interviewing. The data were coded using a grounded theory method to interpret causal relationships between concepts.

Data coding resulted in a causal process model showing various psychological factors that would predict various brand proximity types, and also various attitudinal outcomes of brand proximity. Important emerging market context-specific findings are that the majority of Asian consumers feel emotionally close to developed foreign country originated brands, and that they use brands as a means to escape from various stress factors present in their daily lives.

A value of the study lies in exploring the contemporary types of psychological brand proximity and associated factors in the domain of consumer-brand relationship for the first time among Asian young adults.

As the internet has evolved through the emergence of social media, so too have the communicative practices of The Archers listeners. Many of them now use Twitter to comment, discuss the show or participate in the omnibus episode ‘tweetalong’. Primarily, this chapter recognises the hundred-plus Twitter accounts which have been created by listeners to authentically roleplay characters, organisations, animals and even objects from the show. I frame these practices and ground the chapter in academic discourses of ‘fan fiction’. Reflecting on my own activity as @borsetpolice, I look at the role and place of this fan fiction from the individual practitioner’s perspective but also the wider listener base. In this chapter, I develop an argument that these practices contribute towards the community of listeners online, as well as the show itself. I explore the types of activities and accounts involved, where they often focus around major storylines, and then reflect in detail on the individual’s motivations and practice. I situate this in terms of an opportunity to become involved in an online community that aspires towards everyday rural ideals, and how this can be understood as a significant affective experience for listeners. This need for escapism into ‘banal’ worlds, the desire to participate, and the sense that fan fiction is a game that we take part in are also drawn out as significant.

This study aimed to investigate positive associations between three main motivations (social interaction, information and entertainment) for the use of social network sites (SNSs) and users' well-being, as well as the multiple mediating effects of perceived social support, positive and honest self-presentation.

A sample of 759 active users of SNSs (WeChat Moments, Qzone and Weibo) aged 14–43 years was measured with online questionnaires. Correlation analysis and structural equation modeling were implemented to examine the corresponding hypotheses.

The results showed the overall intensity of motivations was positively associated with users' well-being; perceived social support and positive self-presentation played intermediary roles and honest self-presentation and perceived social support had a chain mediation effect. However, the motivations of social interaction, information and entertainment indirectly affected users' well-being through three different mediation paths.

Although some studies have investigated the effects of motivations (including social interaction, information and entertainment) for SNS use on users' well-being, there has not been a consistent conclusion. The findings may shed light on the motivations for SNS use and how they may affect people's well-being in the digital era, thereby promoting their healthy use of SNSs as well as improved interface design and user management of SNSs.