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Top1. Introduction
Nowadays, there are vast amounts of online active users on different social networking sites and consumers are now more aware of the marketing efforts directed towards them. The ways these users addressed require change due to the evolution of the Internet and the progressive advancements of Web 2.0, which led to drastic changes in the ways consumers exchange information (Hirvijärvi & Mildén, 2017). When it comes to firms, social media is being utilized as an effective tactic to enhance customer involvement and communication (Filo et al., 2015) and as a means of delivering accurate and timely information, services, and other types of content (Al Khasawneh et al., 2021a; Breitsohl, Kunz, & Dowell, 2015; Simon & Tossan, 2018). From the perspective of users, social media allows users to interact (Alalwan et al., 2016; Zhu & Chen, 2015) and freely obtain the information they require at any given time, thus, strengthening the affinity between themselves and marketers (Abu Hashesh et al., 2019; Hirvijärvi & Mildén, 2017).
As a result of the recent signs of progress in technology and social media, a new type of marketing communications flourished, one that is known as viral marketing. Viral marketing is an expansion of Word-of-Mouth (Al Khasawneh et al., 2021b; Racik & Racik, 2014) that has the utmost advantage of being able to “diffuse information from a single node to the whole network, like the propagation of viruses.” (Fan, Leng, Yang & He, 2018, p.1). According to Racik and Racik (2014), Facebook, having a vast network of users, is considered a highly appealing platform for firms to practice viral marketing activities which may, in turn, encourage consumers to share content within their circle of friends and colleagues (Mills, 2012) as viral marketing content shapes the way consumers judge certain content. In addition, viral marketing is appealing to firms as it enables them to quickly disseminate messages at a lower cost than in traditional marketing and allows for greater targeting. Facebook is the most widely used social networking site by consumers (Schultz, 2016; Hutter et al., 2013) and business owners and it is considered as the world’s biggest social networking service (SNS), both in terms of active users per month and geographical reach. As of August, 2021, Facebook had 2.89 billion monthly active users worldwide, which represents an increase of 300 million users from the previous year (Facebook, 2021).