Abstract:
Social media marketing has changed the traditional communication between brands and customers and enabled them to make positive as well as negative influence on brand equity. The purpose of this research was to determine the impact of social media marketing on brand equity, Moreover, this research attempts to examine the role of customer-brand engagement as the mediating variable between social media marketing and brand equity. A descriptive cross-sectional survey was used in the research. The target population was undergraduate students in three universities in Khartoum state. A questionnaire survey was constructed based on previous studies. The sample size was 200 respondents of undergraduate’s students using convenient sampling technique. Data was analyzed by SPSS version 24 and AMOS . The result of this research was established that the social media marketing dimensions online communities and credibility has a positive impact on brand loyalty, while sharing of content dimension has a positive impact on perceived quality, also the results found there is a positive relationship between sharing of content , credibility with the dimensions of customer brand engagement emotions and cognitions while the behavioral intentions dimension has a positive relationship with online communities and credibility. Behavioral intentions has a positive relationship with brand loyalty and brand associations, and there is positive relationship between cognitions and perceived quality. The results also proved that the mediating effect of cognitions and behavioral intention has a positive effect on the relationship between social media marketing and brand loyalty. Since customer brand engagement proved to be a partial mediator between social media marketing and brand equity, the research suggests that a combination of a high equity brand with a significant use of Social Media that will lead to engagement of the customers and success companies
