پیام رسانی شفاهی الکترونیکی در رسانه اجتماعی: روابط اجتماعی، فاصله زمانی و پیام محسوس E-WOM messaging on social media: social ties, temporal distance, and message concreteness

With the emergence of social networking site (SNS) platforms, individuals can now communicate with hundreds or even thousands of people about products, brands, and companies (Mangold and Faulds, 2009). Consequently, researchers are increasing their attention to consumer-to-consumer communications as they impact online promotional strategies (Jeong and Koo, 2015; Lee and Koo, 2012). To successfully craft brand promotion messages that will motivate purchases and encourage sharing, digital marketers must understand why and how consumers share promotional messages. Thus, interest is growing in electronic word-of mouth (e-WOM), defined as “any positive or negative statement made by potential, actual or former customers about a product or company that is made available to a multitude of people and institutions via the internet” (Hennig-Thurau et al., 2004, p. 39). Previous studies have largely focused on why consumers read e-WOM messages (e.g., Hennig-Thurau et al., 2003); how e-WOM influences purchase decisions (e.g., Gupta and Harris, 2010; Jeong and Koo, 2015); and what may cause consumers to perceive credibility in e-WOM communications (e.g., Awad and Ragowsky, 2008). Although much is known about how e-WOM impacts on receivers, considerably less is known about why and how consumers decide to share messages on SNS platforms (Chawdhary and Dall’Olmo Riley, 2015). Our purpose is to investigate the senders’ perspectives of e-WOM usage in SNS platforms. Specifically, informed by recent consumer psychology developments, we investigate how senders share e-WOM on social media websites according to their perceptions regarding tie strength, temporal distance, and message concreteness. We designed and conducted an experimental study with a two (strong tie vs. weak tie) by two (near future vs. distant future) by two (abstract message vs. concrete message) mixed design involving South Korean users of SNS platforms. The results support previous suggestions that consumers are generally more likely to share promotional messages within their strongtie relationships, such as friends and family (e.g., Chawdhary and Dall’Olmo Riley, 2015). However, we further show that senders will more willingly share messages that are congruent with the purchase situation. Specifically, they are more likely to share concrete pictorial messages with their friends if they expect the purchase to occur in the near future. In contrast,they are more likely to share abstract textual messages with their friends if they expect the purchase to occur in the distant future. Thus, we show that strength of ties between e-WOM participants moderates the effect of congruency between psychological distance and message concreteness (Trope and Liberman, 2010). We take the senders’ perspectives to make new theoretical and practical contributions to the emerging literature on e-WOM communication (Cheung et al., 2015; Chowdhary and Dall’Olmo Riley, 2015; Garnefeld et al., 2011). In particular, we show that senders are motivated to share information with their strong-tie audiences according to whether the concreteness of a message is congruent with their perceptions of temporal distance. Our findings suggest that managers who wish to develop more successful SNS-based campaigns should consider the strength of SNS users’ relationships, potential congruency with concrete or abstract messages, and psychological perceptions of whether the purchase will occur sooner or later.