Abstract:
Kenya, and Africa as a whole have a very promising and quickly budding fashion industry on a global level. Understanding the targeted audience and how to interact and engage with them is a key step in ensuring success for the industry. The purpose of this study is to understand the engagement patterns on Instagram of African fashion designers in Kenya and their user’s experience in the consumption of fashion content. The study uses a quantitative methodology to assess the user engagement of Instagram as a tool of engagement for fashion brands and their audience. Questionnaires were used to investigate the outcome of the relationship between two main variables: Engagement, the independent variable, and brand communication the dependent variable. This study uses small samples and engagement with Instagram users. The specific objective of this study is to observe if the five categories from the social media engagement theory; personalization, critical mass, privacy, transparency, and access to social resources, increase the social media engagement of Instagram users while they interact with information meant for them by fashion pages in Africa. The results revealed that all the five categories played a key role in varying levels of how users engaged with the fashion pages. Personalization of a message was found to be the most important, while surprisingly privacy was the least of the user's concerns when it came to engagement. Further studies can choose to focus on a similar study but with a different theoretical framework that can inform more on behavioral aspects that influence how a person choses to interact with social media.
