Search results

Social media has the potential to enable exchange of diverse opinions, foster dialogue on important social issues and exert positive influence on stakeholders and society. However, evidence is contradictory as to whether this is the case; it is possible that millennials' behaviors on social media are mainly driven by conservation (conformity and safety) or self-enhancement (power and achievement). In this research, the authors examine the extent to which different human values (self-transcendence, conservation, self-enhancement and openness to change) influence millennials' activities and behaviors on social media.

The authors conduct three separate surveys on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram with 491 millennials (18–34 years of age) in the USA, examining the influence of four higher-order values of the Schwartz human values model (open self-transcendence, conservation, self-enhancement and openness to change) on specific social media activities (consumption, self-focused and sharing nonpersonal content activities).

First, the authors find that for millennial users, human values significantly influence social media activities. Second, conservation values, followed by self-enhancement values, overshadow the expression of open self-transcendence values on social media. Thus, social media platforms may function more as agents of conservation and self-enhancement than agents of personal growth.

This is among the first studies to examine the influence of human values on social media and to find that human values such as conservation and self-enhancement have a strong influence on users' social media activities, while open self-transcendence values, which lead to expansion and growth, do not find genuine expression on social media.

This study aims to investigate the role of social media in increasing trust, self-perceived creativity and millennial entrepreneurial satisfaction.

The empirical analysis was conducted using a sample of 385 millennial entrepreneurs that were recruited for online survey. After conducting reliability and validity tests, the data were analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling.

The results showed that the quality of social media information had a direct and indirect positive and significant effect on trust and satisfaction. Social media marketing activities had a direct and indirect positive and significant effect on trust and self-perceived creativity. System Quality of social media also has a significant direct influence on trust. However, there is no direct relationship to satisfaction. Finally, social media marketing activities have a significant direct effect on trust and satisfaction.

This research can contribute to marketing experts and millennial entrepreneurs in improving the quality of advertising information and the credibility of social media used to support creativity, trust and satisfaction. In addition, marketing experts and millennial entrepreneurs with online-based communities should optimize their marketing activities on social media.

This study has shown a more comprehensive model of the relationship between information quality, system quality, social media marketing activities, self-perceived creativity, trust and satisfaction. This study also reveals a significant direct and indirect effect of social media marketing activities on satisfaction.

Social media marketing has become a powerful strategic tool for many brands, but scholarly research in this domain is still in its infancy. This study aims to examine the effects of social media marketing activities on consumer online impulse buying intentions via brand resonance and emotional responses by incorporating the direct and moderating effects of social network proneness toward fashion retail brands.

By using snowball sampling, this study recruited 441 netizens (who were using fashion retail brands) and obtained their responses through an online survey. Structural equation modeling was applied to 394 responses for analysis.

The findings discovered that social media marketing activities significantly influenced brand resonance, consumer emotional responses and online impulse buying intentions. Likewise, brand resonance and emotional responses were positively associated with online impulse buying intentions and acted as decisive mediators. Social network proneness’s direct and moderating effects significantly increased consumer online impulse-buying intentions toward fashion retail brands.

This study provides recommendations to retail managers for creating and executing brand positioning, segmenting and targeting strategies to enhance consumers’ intentions for engaging in online impulsive purchases for fashion brands.

This original research contributes to the branding literature and stimulus–organism–response theory by focusing on social media marketing activities, brand resonance, emotional responses, social network proneness and consumer online impulse buying intentions toward fashion retail brands.

In this study, the authors sought to investigate how the implicit social ties of both project owners and potential backers are associated with crowdfunding project success.

Drawing on social ties theory and factors that affect crowdfunding success, in this research, the authors developed a model to study how project owners' and potential backers' implicit social ties are associated with crowdfunding projects' degrees of success. The proposed model was empirically tested with crowdfunding data collected from Kickstarter and social media data collected from Twitter. The authors performed the test using an ordinary least squares (OLS) regression model with fixed effects.

The authors found that project owners' implicit social ties (specifically, their social media activities, degree centrality and betweenness centrality) are significantly and positively associated with crowdfunding projects' degrees of success. Meanwhile, potential project backers' implicit social ties (their social media activities and degree centrality) are negatively associated with crowdfunding projects' degrees of success. The authors also found that project size moderates the effects of project owners' social media activities on projects' degrees of success.

This work contributes to the literature on crowdfunding by investigating how the implicit social ties of both potential backers and project owners on social media are associated with crowdfunding project success. This study extends the previous research on social ties' roles in explaining crowdfunding project success by including implicit social ties, while the literature explored only explicit social ties.

As social media has become an ingrained aspect of our lives—including our political relationships with other citizens and the state—various governments have warned public servants that being politically active online might threaten the reputed impartiality of themselves and the public service. This study examines whether public servants are less likely to be politically active on social media than other citizens, and seeks to understand public servants’ varying disposition to be politically active online by investigating the role of employees’ underlying Big 5 personality traits.

Multivariate regression, along with marginal effects and predicted probabilities, are used to investigate public servants’ online political activity with survey data from Canada, a country where impartiality is a core public service value, and where governments, public service commissions and even public sector unions have voiced cautious messages about the threat online political activity presents to the reputed impartiality of public servants, and the public service at large.

Analysis of the direct effects of being a public servant and each Big 5 personality trait finds that being a public servant significantly, and substantively, reduces the probability of engaging in online political activity, meanwhile, Extraversion and Conscientiousness have consistent, significant and substantive relationships with being politically active online. Subsequent analysis investigating the dynamic between the Big 5 and being a public servant, uncovers a more complex story. Among public servants, Openness and Neuroticism, rather than Extraversion and Conscientiousness, are associated with significant and substantive changes in the probability of engaging in some online politically activities. This is consistent with research investigating the relationship between the Big 5 and risk aversion, given that public servants in Canada work in an environment with a highly cautious discourse portraying social media as a serious risk to impartiality.

The findings also speak to best practices for public service human resource managers by shedding light how public servants’ behavior can be better understood and managed by paying attention to their underlying personality traits.

This study moves beyond analyzing trends between public and private sector employees, to instead examine public servants’ online political activity. This study offers theoretical and empirical insight into how public servants’ disposition to be politically active online is, in part, influenced by their underlying Big 5 personality traits, specifically, Neuroticism and Openness.

Social media has broadened the scope of luxury brand marketing and has emerged as a salient tool for Internet marketing campaigns in the post-pandemic world. Under the theoretical lens of the SOR model, this study aims to explore the nexus between brand social media marketing (BSMM) activities and online consumer brand engagement (CBE) via mediating consumers' emotions in the modest luxury fashion branding post-pandemic context.

This study conducted a post-pandemic survey in five major metropolitan cities in Pakistan with a total of 584 eligible young consumers who follow the fan pages of fashion brands. Structural equation modeling was used to test hypotheses.

The findings reveal that BSMM activities have a significant influence on three emotion states (pleasure, arousal and dominance); however, only pleasure and arousal significantly drive CBE (i.e. affective engagement and activation). Moreover, the results show that pleasure and arousal partially mediate the relationships between BSMM activities and affective and activation dimensions of CBE, while dominance fully mediates the relationship between BSMM activities and cognitive engagement. Interestingly, only affective engagement was shown to be the most potent component of CBE in fostering positive emotions toward luxury fashion brands.

This study contributes to the literature on social media marketing and consumer brand engagement by revealing valuable insights into post-pandemic luxury fashion branding that could assist academicians and marketing practitioners of non-Western markets.

Many studies have examined the use of social media by either customers or firms, especially in developed markets. However, little is known about why young individual entrepreneurs use digital channels (DCs) as business platforms in emerging markets (EMs) and how they integrate them into their marketing activities. This paper aims to try filling this gap.

Given the exploratory nature of this research, the authors employ a qualitative approach based on a focus group (12 participants) and semi-structured interviews (8 participants) with young entrepreneurs in Saudi Arabia. The authors adopted a deductive thematic analysis based on pre-determined theoretical frameworks to analyse and interpret the data.

The authors found that the young entrepreneurs mainly used Instagram, Snapchat and, to a moderate extent, YouTube as digital marketing channels for advertising purposes. However, they used WhatsApp for establishing direct contact and personalising communication with customers. The entrepreneurs used these channels because they are useful, easy to use, cost-effective, fun and widely used by local customers. The authors also found that the entrepreneurs used social media and offline channels conjointly in three main marketing activities (communication/promotion, transactions and customer service) to boost the customer purchasing process. The complementarity of social media and offline channels was found to improve brand visibility, enlarge markets and strengthen the customer relationship. However, the achievement of these benefits varied across small firms depending on the entrepreneurs' abilities in coordinating multiple channels and according to the distinctiveness of their businesses.

This study contributes to the entrepreneurial literature by extending the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) to explain the motives behind the use of DCs amongst individual entrepreneurs. Furthermore, this paper proposes a novel theoretical framework for studying the interaction between online and offline marketing channels during the purchasing process. Through this framework, the study provides new insights into channel coordination and multi-channel customer behaviours from the entrepreneur's perspective.

This study helps understand why small firms use different DCs. Likewise, it shows how young entrepreneurs coordinate online/offline channels in a complementary manner. The findings could also help in designing appropriate programmes encouraging young entrepreneurs to use online channels and social media to enhance their business activities.

This study offers a novel attempt at explaining the use of DCs and their interaction with traditional channels from the entrepreneur's perspective and brings new insights to why and how young entrepreneurs use DCs in an emerging market.

Despite the prevalence of technology in health care, marketing research on social media in the birthspace is limited. The purpose of this paper is to explore how birthing women leverage social media for transformative well-being in the liminal context of birth.

A qualitative study of women who had recently experienced birth was undertaken. Thematic analysis of data from in-depth interviews reveals birthing women’s digital practices and social media capabilities for well-being in a liminal space.

Within the birthspace, women use social media and digital platforms in an effortful and goal-directed way for role transitions and transformation, curating self and other history, goal striving and normalizing experience. These digital practice styles facilitate consumer integration of the liminal digital birthspace and in situ service encounter enabling diverse value outcomes. Drawing on liminality and social presence theories, the authors interpret these practices as demonstrating three interactive liminal stages of suspending, comprehending and transforming. Multi-modality and rapid connection afforded by digital devices and social media platforms provide social presence (according to perceived immediacy and intimacy) enabling transformative well-being outcomes.

This study is unique, as it provides insights into the traditionally private health service experience of birth. Further, the authors extend the understanding of liminal spaces and use of digital technology, specifically for transformative outcomes, by proposing a framework of consumers’ digital practice styles for well-being in liminal spaces.

This study investigates the impact of social media marketing activities on customer purchase intention in the Malaysian property market.

The study utilises a survey research approach to collect data from 331 respondents using a questionnaire.

The findings of the study reveal that entertainment, interaction, customisation and word-of-mouth variables had a significant and positive impact on customer purchase intention in the Malaysian property market. However, the study demonstrates a positive but insignificant impact of trendiness on customer purchase intention.

First, the study relies on a sample of 331 respondents in Malaysia, which may limit the generalizability of the findings to a broader population. Hence, future research could aim for a more extensive and diverse sample to enhance the validity of the results. Second, while the study identified significant relationships, the measurement of variables, in particular “trendiness,” could be refined for better accuracy. The future study may consider including a more precise measurement to provide comprehensive insights.

The results suggest that marketers should focus on creating engaging and interactive content, providing personalised experiences and leveraging word-of-mouth recommendations to enhance customer purchase intention. The overall findings highlight the importance of social media marketing activities in the property market and their potential to drive customer purchase intention.

The study contributes to the existing literature by shedding light on the role of social media marketing activities in influencing customer purchase intention in the Malaysian property market.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there is no similar studies have been conducted in this area of research.

The purpose of this study is to provide an in-depth understanding of the B2B customers’ perspective regarding salespeople’s social media use.

The study adopts a qualitative approach based on semi-structured interviews with 26 key informants performing their job in customer role in various industries.

The authors inductively identify five themes regarding the B2B customers’ perspective of social media use in B2B selling. These themes allow for valuable implications for social selling activities and expected outcomes.

Against a growing body of literature on drivers, best practices and outcomes of social media use by B2B salespeople, less attention has been paid to the customer’s side. The authors extend current research by providing a more complete picture of social selling activities and expected outcomes.