Social Media Ambiance Can Make Strong Message for Consumer Brand Purchase Behavior

Introduction

The paradigm shift to the digital era and increase in the number of online users throughout the globe is forcing companies operating in different industry sectors to think in an innovative way of interacting with customers (Cheong & Morrison, 2008). Among the various platforms available for communicating with customers the tools which are gaining popularity for reaching the consumers is the social media (Trusov, Bucklin & Pauwels, 2009). Social media is gaining attention and has become a very important part of the business sector and peoples’ lives. With its increasing usage among the marketers, it is used as one of the preferred platforms to interact and reach customers. Social networking sites, blogs, online communities, virtual worlds all fall under the umbrella of social media. Organizations are using social media as a channel of communication for supporting, empowering and creating awareness among customers (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010). If taking into account, the adoption and usage levels people all over the globe gave social media an exceptional success. Social media has become a priority for people to be in touch with each other and also expressing their ideas and thoughts. Moreover, they interact with brands and organizations. Social media became the imperative platform for customer’s knowledge. With the intention to purchase, its impacts are significant owing to the investigational nature of brands available on social networks.

According to Chen, 2011 social media influence the sale of the product, consumer decision making as well as forecast the sales which help in making the marketing strategy for the company. There is no doubt that social media is turning out to be the branding mechanism. Marketers are proactive on social media to examine and respond to negative feedback about their brands or products (Brown and Blakeman, 2010). Social networking makes a faster travel of information which is significantly cheaper from traditional marketing platforms giving an innovative idea for branding by spreading the information more effectively (Chordas, 2009). Moreover, members of a brand fan page on social media are more inclined to articulate a positive attitude towards them than negative (Chordas, 2009). Social media communities, blogs and social networking sites (SNSs) have a definitive impact on consumer purchase decisions (OTX research 2008). Social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google + and Blogs have influenced the consumers' behavior to purchase online. Brand communities in social media provide details of customers of their shopping experiences and information on their favorite brand and also encourage others to purchase (Gensler, Volckner, Liu-Thompkins, & Weiertz, 2013). Such interactions have great benefits as it strengthens trust, decreases search costs, decreases risk (Kim et al. 2008). These effects are more visible in social commerce activities on social media (Liang, Ho, Li & Turban, 2011). Social media plays a very significant role in social commerce (Hajli, 2014) and is associated with online communities and social networking sites (SNSs) (Lu and Hsiao, 2010). In recent times trust can be backed by social commerce by increasing social interactions of consumers, which enhances trust (Hajli et al., 2014). Therefore, trust is a significant point in a social media context. In a very short duration, marketers all around the globe are using social media for a variety of marketing objectives including advertising, building loyalty, innovation, product development, customer relationship management, branding, etc. but privacy concern on consumers’ responses to social media cannot be neglected as advertisements on social media are positively related to ad effectiveness (Trampe, Stapel, Siero, and Mulder, 2010). In light of this, there is lots of anecdotal proof that highly concretize messages increase privacy concern, but only a few researchers have attempted to figure out the privacy concern in social media context (Zhu and Chang, 2016).