مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد بازدید از صفحه فیس بوک خرده فروشی – الزویر ۲۰۱۹

This study aims to identify consumers’ motives for visiting the Facebook page of a food retail chain. Data were collected using an online survey of 1208 members of the FB page of a Canadian food retail chain. The results show that respondents’ main motives are to obtain information on discounted items, consult recommended recipes, enter contests, and learn about new products available in-store. Analyses identify informative, dynamism, and enjoyment values as the most important motives that influence attitudes toward the food retail chain’s FB page. A further qualitative analysis of the FB pages of four supermarket chains supports these results.

Introduction

Social networking sites (SNSs) are electronic platforms that allow users to create their profiles, share photos, images and texts, and develop and maintain connections with other users. SNSs, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and MySpace, have changed the way people/customers communicate with each other and with businesses (Dijkmans et al., 2015). They play an important role in everyday life and have undergone remarkable global expansion and growth (Gangadharbatla et al., 2012). Facebook is the leading social network platform, with 2.13 billion monthly active users worldwide as of December 2017 (Facebook, 2017). It is the second most trafficked website after Google.com (Alhabash et al., 2014). In 2013, 70% of Fortune 500 companies had a Facebook page and 96% of Fortune 500 companies in the specialty retail industry used Facebook (Barnes et al., 2013). Facebook is essential to social media marketing success (eMarketer, 2016). Almost all social media marketers (95.8%) believe FB generates the best ROI (eMarketer, 2016). Facebook is the preferred social media platform for business-to-customer relationships, LinkedIn is the most popular platform for business-to-business relations, and Twitter is the favourite among young people who value short communications (Gamboa and Gonçalves, 2014). Marketers have identified SNSs as important platforms that facilitate interactions between companies/brands and consumers, foster customer engagement, and develop social commerce, (Gangadharbatla et al., 2012; Ng, 2016; Pongpaew et al., 2017).