The Sound of Ripple: The Study of Facebook Fan Page User’s eWOM Intentions from Double-edged Sword Perspectives

• Main Authors: Kuan-Yu Lin, 林冠宇
• Other Authors: Wen-Hai Chih
• Format: Others
• Published: 2013
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/8s588v

碩士 === 國立東華大學 === 企業管理學系 === 101 === Social networking sites (SNSs) become an important marketing channel that corporates try to generate maximum effect of eWOM, which is called ripple effect. Since the characteristics of SNSs provide firms to publish advertisements without limitation of time, geography and space, firms seek for factors affecting users to generate eWOM intentions. This study applies Use and Gratification Theory (U&G Theory) to provide a clear view of environmental factors which users contact in corporate Fan Page. Based on Dual Mediation Hypothesis (DMH), this study proposes Hedonic - Interesting - Utilitarian DMH (HIU-DMH) for the users’ eWOM generation process examination. For social interaction perspective, this study applies Social Cognitive Theory as fundamental support for exploring how users’ interactivities affecting eWOM intentions generation. Two perspectives are integrated in this study and formulated so-called double-edge sword perspectives. The survey of this study collects 1135 samples for statistical analysis. From the results, this study finds: (1) Both platform perspective factors and social interaction perspective factors have impact on users’ eWOM intention generation. (2) Participants, Fan Page users, have different levels of involvements which can be grouped into three clusters and these three clusters focus on different dimensions of factors in the Fan Page context which results in users’ eWOM intentions. (3) Perceived news entertainment and perceived news informativeness from U&G Theory provide suitable fit as antecedents of HIU-DMH. (4) Three different dimensions of attitude towards the news play important mediating roles. (5) Interestingness of attitude towards the news plays a more important role in hedonic dimension than utilitarian dimension. (6) Fan Page users are more likely to generate eWOM intentions when in a more user-user, user-corporate interaction environment. Based on the findings from data analysis, this study proposes following management implications: (1) Due to Fan Page users’ different levels of involvements, factors affecting Fan Page users to generate eWOM intentions are also different. Fan Page managers should not only formulate marketing strategy to overall fans but also formulate distinctive marketing strategies for specific groups of users. (2) For highly involved users, managers can emphasize more on utilitarian dimension news, which in other words publishes more informative news rather than entertaining news. Managers should also create an interdependent Fan Page environment and provide feedback to users for fulfilling users’ expectations of the consequences after conducting eWOM intentions. (3) For median involved users, managers should emphasize on publishing news contain entertainment factors and create a more interdependent Fan Page environment to achieve ripple effect. (4) For low involved users, they are more likely to obtain information while have less intention to separate the information from platform perspective, but managers should keep linking with them. Once the involvement level increased, users will have intention to give and to pass information. By creating an interdependent self-construal Fan Page atmosphere can also stimulate low involved users have higher intention to pass information.