Commercial Value in Online Social Networks using eWOM

Abstract

Online social networks and Facebook as the shining leader are among the mostpopular websites. As aresult, they became a fascinating infrastructure for businesses that arewilling to leverage this tremendous opportunity. Although the vast majority of marketersare using Facebook as a marketing tool, most of the current efforts have not yet yielded the desired ROI. In this research the researchers analyzed the main factors that expedite commercialword-of-mouth in Facebook and figured out how companies can leverage the realpotential commercial value of the network. In order to do that, the technologyacceptance model (TAM) and the theory of reasoned action (TRA) were used, in thecontext of the social networks. Results show that self-expressiveness seems to be the most influencing factor thataffects the perceived usefulness, the attitude towards the social network and theinformation reading activity, and is highly correlated with both the perceived ease ofuse and the attitude towards the commercial information shared in the social network.Perceived usefulness is affecting theinformation reading activity. Out of the two measured activities, information reading activity is affected by self-expressivenessand perceived usefulness and commercial information sharing areaffected by the attitude towards the shared commercial information and by the intention to share commercial information. Consequently, companies that would like to encourage commercial-oriented word-of-mouthshould improve the usefulness of the social network for their customers, and theability of these to self-express themselves.

Keywords: Social Networks, Facebook, Word-of-Mouth,Facebook’s Commercial value.