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Social media particularly Facebook acts as a global force with over 100 billion connections worldwide. Each day Facebook users flaunt their activities, pictures, and likes. Many of these "likes" represent endorsements where users broadcast their favorite brands. This form of marketing engagement can be effectively measured. The purpose of this study is to conduct a quantitative survey among Facebook users to explore and analyze the impact of friends clicking "like". This study will test brand recall, particularly global brands, and the impact a friend's endorsement, "like" has on future purchasing decisions of global brands.
INTRODUCTION
Facebook currently remains the top social networking site on the web and is considered to be no longer in its infancy (Nielsen, 2012). Even more significant, approximately over two billion users participate on the internet in some type of online networking environment (Stats, 2013). With so many users worldwide, brand managers can only begin to contemplate what this exposure could mean for their brand and the benefits that could be achieved. As consumers increasingly obtain their news and connect with friends and family within social networking sites, brands are not only adopting these social networking sites as opportunities to communicate with consumers, but embracing this new found interactive cocktail party where anyone can listen and join the fun (Bushelow, 2012).
Since the advent of the internet, measuring the effectiveness of brand advertising was very difficult and many times would not yield the best results. Display advertising usually in the form of banner advertisements did not achieve the results needed to support many marketing decisions. A phenomenon called "advertising banner blindness," the tendency in which consumers "ignore and avoid banners or display advertisements, is especially prominent among heavy internet users" (Cho, 2003). Marketing managers already understood the barriers which were present on the web yet needed to seek creative ways to challenge and revise these barriers within social networking environments. This technique employing social media and social influencers to achieve marketing and business goals were coined "social influence marketing" (Singh & Diamond, 2012).
Because Facebook is the largest social networking site to date (Shih, 2011), it has become critical "to examine the factors that influence how consumers process advertising messages which are endorsed (like) by friends within their Facebook network...