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The evolution of social media has been accepted by its users leading several companies to change their communication strategies from traditional media to social media (Naeem, 2019). There is a great difference between social media and traditional media. Based on the individualization, social media simplify two-way communication between customers and between companies and customers, which is not applicable in traditional media (Diffley & McCole, 2019). Social media comprises various platforms such as: social networking sites (SNS) (e.g. Facebook), creativity works sharing sites (e.g. YouTube), business networking sites (e.g. LinkedIn), etc. (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010). Mainly, SNS have become the core media through which companies communicate information about their brands (Naeem, 2019). SNS is considered as an attractive medium for increasing advertising success and effectiveness due to its dialogical potential, and its capability to track users’ behavioral responses (Appel et al., 2020).
Advertising through SNS supports a company’s relationships with prospects, which benefits to identify correctly the target consumers (Naeem, 2019). Burg (2013) mentioned that the degree of a SNS ad effectiveness can be evaluated by examining the interactions (such as the number of “Likes” or “Shares”). Thus, for a SNS ad to be effective, it should be able to lead the user to a positive attitude toward empathy expression, which means the willingness of a user to respond in a favorable manner such as click like, share the ad or write comments toward SNS ad (Lee & Hong, 2016). The attitude toward empathy expression is theoretically rooted on the attitude toward the ad and it is more related with the nature of SNS (Lee & Hong, 2016). Therefore, many researchers have highlighted the importance of understanding the use of SNS ad in an effective way in the marketing communication strategies (Dao et al., 2014; Hamouda, 2018; Naeem, 2019). The SNS ad represents an evolving area as mentioned by Diffley and McCole (2019) which means that the body of knowledge of SNS ad is still developing (Appel et al., 2020). The Facebook is still the world’s most used SNS. The monthly active users exceed 2.5 billion and user numbers is growing progressively within most countries in 2019. However, the marketers face a difficulty in reaching all these users using Facebook advertising (Digital, 2020). So, this research will focus on the effectiveness of SNS ad to grab the attention of more Facebook audience to be able to lead them to favorable responses via their attitude toward empathy expression.
Besides, some lacks have been found in the previous studies. First, few studies have examined some elements of the effective SNS ad (such as: Taylor et al., 2011; Logan et al., 2012; Lee & Hong, 2016; Hamouda, 2018) which reflects the need for further investigation. Second, the majority of the previous studies have focused on users’ attitude toward advertising instead of users’ attitude toward empathy expression. However, attitude toward empathy expression is more associated with the context of SNS as mentioned by Lee and Hong (2016). Third, most of the prior studies did not take into consideration the users’ behavioral responses to a SNS ad. Based on Ha and Lee (2018), they recommended to pay more attention on users’ behavioral responses to a SNS ad by including additional responses related to the SNS ad like sharing and writing posts, which are viewed more active user behavior than like the ad. Fourth, when evaluating the value of SNS ad in the earlier studies, the main focus was on the college students as the main sample. However, based on Digital (2020) the 18-24 age group only represents 24% of total active users specifically on Facebook, which means that previous studies have neglected the majority of active Facebook users. Fifth, there is a lack of research in the Middle East region, particularly Egypt, where the digital advertising industry is growing since the country has the highest increase in Internet penetration rate across the Arab world in recent years (59% in 2016 as opposed to 22% in 2013) (Santander, 2020).