Reference: Chang, Y., Yu, H., Lu, H. (2015). Persuasive messages, popularity cohesion, and message diffusion in social media marketing. Journal of Business Research, 68(4), 777-782

Main idea: The influence of Social media marketing on consumer’s communicative intention, more specificaly e-WOM (e- word of mouth)

Summary:

Social media marketing has become one of the most influential marketing methods today. As people increase their time spent on social media and social networks such as Facebook, or twitter, they tend to share information and build relationships and try to gather information and knowledge. It has become a powerful communication tool between companies and their customers to communicate messages faster and more efficiently at a much lower cost. However, it is a challenge for marketers nowadays to try and find ways to persuade their internet users to share information and posts online.

This study “investigates message characteristics and how internet users’ evaluations affect communicative intention”. This study uses different groups to understand their communication purposes.

For starters, what affects internet user behavior is what is known as electronic word of mouth and referred to as eWOM. Sometimes, people actually take into consideration what other people have to say concerning a product or service more than when it is advertised on television or even on internet, and this could be a plus for companies who can try to get people to speak up and share their thoughts on their personal blogs, or social networking sites. What helps in the diffusion of such messages in a timely manner and to a relatively large audience is the existence of these social networking sites, blogs, forums, interactive social media that can contribute in conveying messages and opinions and influence others into doing the same.

A study was carried out to show the possible links between persuasive messages, beliefs and attitudes, relative significance, user expertise and behavioral intention to share or like the post posted. The study was carried around a Taiwanese cooking site “icook” where they studied what actually made people share information, or like it, if they actually did then what made them do it, was it the usefulness of the message, or the persuasive factor they found in the message, or was it simply the post’s popularity.  The main findings carried out after the analysis was the importance of external influential factors and popularity play an important role in influencing people into liking and sharing the information presented. And it was suggested that companies and specifically marketers, must collect statistics on likes, discussions and reviewers from social network pages to be able to better understand where they stand and what to fix in order to get more people to collaborate with the sharing of information.