The Role of Social Media Engagement in Enhancing Economic Sustainability: A Systematic Review of the Fashion Industry

Abstract

In recent years, the relationship between social media engagement and economic sustainability has grown into one of the most consequential intersections shaping how the fashion industry operates and evolves. This systematic review draws on peer-reviewed literature published between 2022 and 2026 to investigate the pathways through which social media engagement translates into meaningful economic sustainability outcomes across the global fashion industry, with particular emphasis on evidence from Nigeria and comparably positioned developing economies. Grounded in a corpus of 46 primary sources assembled through structured database searches and refined using the PRISMA screening protocol, the review surfaces five interconnected thematic areas. These concern the role of content quality and posting frequency in cultivating consumer trust and brand loyalty; how platform-specific strategies operate with varying effectiveness across different demographic groups; the function of influencer collaborations as mediators of economic sustainability; the growing contribution of digital technologies such as artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and blockchain in enabling sustainable fashion practice; and the significance of customer experience management in connecting online engagement to tangible offline economic outcomes. The review also identifies meaningful gaps in the existing scholarship, most notably the limited number of longitudinal studies conducted within the Nigerian context and the sparse direct attention paid to how parasocial relationships shape sustainable purchasing behaviour. Taken together, the findings make a compelling case that thoughtfully and strategically executed social media engagement is far more than a conventional promotional instrument. It operates, rather, as a structural foundation upon which durable economic sustainability across fashion value chains can be genuinely built. The paper closes by proposing concrete directions for researchers, industry practitioners, and policymakers who seek to harness the power of digital engagement in advancing
sustainable economic outcomes for the fashion sector.