Why we individuals visit and engage with corporate Facebook pages is the focus of this article, which seeks to develop three socio-cognitive methods to incentivise greater cohesive usage that may benefit a company.

The authors view corporate communications activities with their individual components integrated through different disciplines to consider how they may add value in the relationship to the end-user. It is an interesting inter-disciplinary approach, but the abstract and its jargon-rich environment may mean some potential readers may pass it by, failing to appreciate its significance. A more focussed, accessible abstract, as well as a more relaxed writing style throughout, would have been preferable as the article demanded a certain focus that was not necessary.

A well-developed, broad and quite relevant literature review pulls in the theories of uses-and-gratification and social cognitive theory together and sets it for application to different user categories. As a lot can change in a relatively short time in the online world, so it is noticeable that many of the references were quite old and one wonders if no relevant, newer intelligence was available. Certainly, no mention was made to suggest it was not extant. At times the literature cited started to feel less supportive and more as filling material.

The authors rely on a 2013 reference to note ‘users generally show little interest in producing content on corporate Facebook pages’ before linking to a 2009 reference stating that people use telephone and e-mail to engage in dialogue with organizations. This seems quite hard to believe today, as I regularly see content being produced and dialogue being extended, whether it is complaints, feedback or in some cases even participation in a more creative capacity, perhaps inspired by a mini-contest.

These aged findings led to three research questions that the authors sought to answer through an online survey using snowball sampling. I wonder if there is a risk of an echo-chamber being formed, rather than a more structured sample between different demographics being used, especially considering some of the more curious statements espoused thus far. The survey had 215 unique respondents who on average used Facebook for an hour a day, interacting with corporate pages several times a week (it is worth looking at chapter 4.1 for details). Other than this, the survey methodology seemed acceptable. For the avoidance of doubt, no attempt has been made to replicate the statistical analysis or verify calculations.

The article concludes with a discussion that camouflages matters with verbosity instead of flowing clarity. This is a shame. The authors claim that the theoretical framework deployed has been valid, with the study evidencing a difference between brand page usage and personal social network page usage – something that may be reasonably expected? Extensive limitations are noted and a call for further research, as you may expect.

Matters are rounded off with two paragraphs considering the implications for integrated communications management, which perhaps is the clearest and most interesting part of all, despite it feeling a tad generic.

Unfortunately, it felt that this article could have been a lot better with perhaps not much more effort. It is not just the writing style and structure, but a little more focus, more relevant and timely literature and additional exposure to the data may have made a major difference.