Analysing Social Media’s Role in Developing Emotional Attachment and Driving Cross Buying behaviour: A Bibliometric Study

This bibliometric study maps the development of scholarly literature on the relationship between social media marketing, emotional attachment and cross-buying behaviour. Bibliographic data were collected over a two-week period from Crossref through Publish or Perish using three search keywords: Social Media Marketing, Emotional Attachment and Cross-Buying. Each search produced 1,000 publication records, giving an initial dataset of 3,000 documents. The records were analysed in VOSviewer using keyword co-occurrence network analysis, overlay visualisation and density visualisation. The findings show that the literature is organised around connected keyword clusters. Social media marketing appears with concepts such as social media, advertising, brand, brand awareness, purchase intention and loyalty, while attachment appears with concepts such as emotion, individual, age and attachment style. Linking terms, including factor, mediating role and review, indicate conceptual connections between marketing activity, consumer emotion and behavioural outcomes. The overlay visualisation suggests temporal variation in the emergence of research topics, whereas the density visualisation indicates that attachment and social media marketing are the most prominent keywords in the dataset. The study provides a structured overview of the knowledge base and identifies dominant themes and potential areas for further inquiry on social media marketing, emotional attachment and cross-buying behaviour in digital marketing scholarship.