Exploring Social Media Users' Engagement Based on User-Generated Images with the Physical, Natural, and Amenity Servicescape Dimensions - Focusing on Cafés in Seoul, South Korea

Abstract

Society has managed to incorporate new technologies into daily lifestyles. People stay up to date with the lives of their friends and family by looking into each other’s social media profiles. Subsequently, when they see other people’s social media pages they get ideas of new places to go and new experiences to have. Nowadays customers have multiple options of places to visit, so for café businesses to stay afloat in the overflowing market, they must understand how social media users are behaving toward their posts. In order to analyze the engagement (likes and comments) generated by posts that highlight the physical, natural, and amenity servicescape dimensions, this study utilizes user-generated content (UGC) from the Instagram hashtags of 46 cafés in Seoul, South Korea. For that purpose, this thesis performs a clustering analysis to define the servicescape dimensions present in the dataset (the aforementioned physical, natural, and amenity servicescape dimensions) and subsequently analyses the likes and comments of the images of each cluster to determine if there is a significant difference between the engagement obtained by each cluster. The findings of this thesis suggest that the presence of the physical and natural servicescape dimensions in Instagram posts tends to show a higher number of likes and comments than other combinations of the physical, natural, and amenity dimensions. However, the grouping of the physical and amenity dimensions has the tendency to show a higher average of comments than the rest of the groupings. This thesis is done in hopes that it helps future researchers advance the field of servicescape as viewed through social media, and additionally, that both café owners and designers can use this information to create design strategies that have the potential to be successful at obtaining high levels of engagement on social media.