Mobile Phone Purchasing and Brand Presence on Facebook

Introduction

Social network sites (SNS) represent an important and relatively new category of influence for firms (Boyd and Ellison, 2008; McLaughlin and Lee, 2011; Narayanan and Shmatikov, 2009). Social network sites allow customers to create profiles, connect with people and to share interests, opinions and other content (Boyd and Ellison, 2008; Trusov et al., 2009). From this, two important marketing factors emerge. Firstly, as Narayanan and Shmatikov (2009) point out, a key reason why social networking platforms have attracted businesses is that they can provide personalised and targeted advertising platforms. Additionally, electronic word of mouth (ewom) marketing represents an effective promotional technique, capable of influencing purchasing (Trusov et al., 2009). Concurrently, a new prolific stream of studies has developed, focussing on the effects of online advertising on the consumer buying decision (Al-Alak and Alnawas, 2010; Sathish, 2011; Li and Leckenby, 2004; Poyry et al., 2013; Yousif, 2012). In terms of ewom, a social network site like Facebook - the most popular SNS site in the world (TNW, 2013) - has the ability to generate considerable impact when products are reviewed and ‘liked’ by consumers. Other consumers see this, alongside any sponsored advertising the company may undertake on the same site. (Tsimonis and Dimitriadi, 2014). To date, whilst it is clear that mobile phone companies have a presence on Facebook, there has been very little empirical work carried out on the impact of this medium on purchasing, particularly in relation to young professionals. In addition, significantly, a review of the literature shows that although there is extensive work on influences on the buying decision process relevant to mobile phone purchasing, it is often set outside of the SNS context.