Does Your Company Engage Efficiently on Social Media? Improving Performance Using DEA Model and Visualization

ABSTRACT: Despite an implosion in the use of social media, quantifying the efficiency of customer engagement continues to be a major challenge for most companies. In this study, we propose a data envelopment analysis (DEA) model to measure the relative operational efficiency of companies' customer engagement on social media based on non-financial inputs and outputs. We collected data from the Facebook and Twitter pages of 56 fast-food companies over 12 months in 2020, and used DEA, cluster analysis, and visualization techniques to perform a comparative efficiency analysis. Our study identified four distinct clusters of companies and mapped them to the corresponding stages of the social media maturity (SMM) model. By integrating the DEA model with the SMM, we provide a novel mechanism for assessing social media engagement efficiency. Furthermore, based on the results of our analysis, we offer strategic and tactical level recommendations to inefficient companies for improving their social media engagement performance.