The impact of social media on consumers. Do age and gender moderate the effect of social media on trust?

Abstract

Customers’ experience is the centric point that marketers of all industries must focus to embrace effectively. Thus, brand managers apply many kinds of marketing strategies to attract consumers. The recent popular trendy to drive marketing now is social media marketing as social media bring great opportunities to online users; they can easily engage in social communities and stay focus via Internet. In recent decades, people witness the fast growth of social media in the cyber world, which delivers enormous effects to our daily activities (See-To & Ho, 2014). The goal of this thesis is to evaluate the influence of social media on trust, intention to buy. The research model is built by borrowing from technology acceptance model (TAM) as well as based on the theory of planned behavior model (TPB). The results of the study emphasize that social media positively affects consumers’ social interaction; consequently it improves trust and intention to buy. Furthermore, the outcomes also highlight that trust attains noticeable impact on buying intention. Likewise, the perceived usefulness (PU) of networking sites is indicated as a contributed feature. According to these findings, this thesis proposes some realistic tactics for practitioners to utilize social media as an omnipotent and influential marketing tool of sales and services.