Social Media Engagement: Reshaping the Consumption Patterns of Generation Y Caribbean and Latin American Consumers

Generation Y is at the forefront of the rise in consumer engagement with brands due to the participatory nature of social media. Social media is largely user generated and is instrumental in the information uprising facilitated by the internet (Kamel & Hussein, 2014). The platform of social media has changed how people interact with each other and even with brands as well as how they make consumption decisions. This transformation has led to research to determine the parameters of said influence on the consumer-decision process within the developed world. This chapter reviews this research and gives directions on future research to include developing nations within Latin America and the Caribbean. Research in this area is important due to the fact that there are limited studies addressing the developing world's use of social media to inform consumption decisions even though consumers within these markets are using these platforms similarly to their developed world counterparts.