THE IMPACT OF VISUAL CONTENT OF LINKEDIN ON CONSUMER ENGAGEMENT: WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO MILLENNIALS IN WESTERN PROVINCE, SRI LANKA

Abstract

1. Introduction Visual content has been considered a significant factor in business and public communication over the past few years. With the increasing usage of social media, brands are increasingly utilizing social media marketing instruments. Due to the information fragmentation consumers tend to skip or trickily choose the content that they engage with. Hence, this study aims to investigate the impact of LinkedIn’s visual content on consumer engagement in Western Province, Sri Lanka. 2. Research Methodology Uses and Gratifications Theory was applied as the ground of this study. It was conducted a quantitative study with minimal intervention and an unplanned study setting. The data were collected from 384 respondents using the purposive sampling technique. A five-point Likert scale was used as the questionnaire design. Multiple linear regression analysis was performed to analyze the survey data to test the hypotheses using IBM SPSS 25 software. 3. Findings and Discussion The findings were in-lined with the existing literature that visuals with informative, entertaining, and remunerative content significantly influence consumer engagement. Furthermore, it indicates that visuals with entertaining content are the most influential in terms of consumer engagement. 4. Conclusion and Implications Marketers can increase the informative, entertaining, and remunerative visual content in LinkedIn ads to improve user engagement. The study findings offer theoretical and managerial implications for firms, professionals, advertisers, and future researchers to conduct a profitable social media campaign on LinkedIn and future research.