۱- Introduction

۲- Literature review and development of hypotheses

۳- Research method

۴- Data analysis

۵- Discussion

References

Abstract

With the prevalence of Internet, social media has become an important means for online marketing events. Individuals and companies both create fan pages on online platforms and develop business opportunities using social media. While many past studies have investigated social media, few have mentioned the effects of social media marketing activities. This study proposed the effects of social media marketing activities on continuance intention, participation intention and purchase intention via the mediation of social identification, perceived value, and satisfaction. To empirically test the effects of social media marketing activities, this study conducted an online survey on 502 social media users for data analysis. The analytical results indicated that social media marketing activities indirectly affect satisfaction through social identification and perceived value. At the same time, social identification and perceived value directly affect satisfaction that then influences continuance intention, participation intention and purchase intention. Finally, the academic and management implications based on the empirical results of this study are provided as references for the improvement of social media marketing.

Introduction

The rise of social media has reflected people’s need for interpersonal interactions. Social networking sites have brought social activities into the online virtual world. For example, the real-time texting facilitates information sharing and online social contacts among people. This phenomenon suggests companies use social media as an important part of their online marketing strategies. Social media marketing is defined as commercial marketing events or processes that use social media in an attempt to positively influence consumers’ purchase behavior (Dann, 2010). In the face of the rapid rise of virtual community websites, many companies have already begun to think about how to rely on such sites to deepen their communications and interactions with users in order to build a sense of close and friendly relations and form virtual brand communities (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010; Chen et al., 2014). As the Internet has developed different forms of media and applications over time, it has changed the traditional human interactions of the past and also created new bridges for communication. With the popularity of Internet and mobile technologies and the widespread reliance on online social media brand preferences, the sharing of consumer experiences and brand information has become a new field of brand marketing. Therefore, the development of social groups has become more efficient. Even among group members who have never met each other, a good sense of community can take shape. Communities that collect goods and services of a specific brand are called virtual brand communities. Prahalad and Ramaswamy (2004) suggested that consumers are not only interested in making product purchases; rather, they also want to create experiences with other consumers or experts. Therefore, participation in online communities can lead to a high degree of cohesion among consumers, thereby affecting the market.