Like It or Not: Issue of Credibility in Facebook Advertising

Abstract

Issues like advertising credibility and privacy trust have become the hot topics for social networking sites (SNSs) of late. In spite of the critiques, the trend of employing SNS's as advertising platform by marketing practitioners is still on the rise. This approach of adopting SNS's probably suits marketers' objectives to reach and communicate their users and potential customers with relevant ads and personalized messages. Besides, this approach is expected to increase the value of advertising for both users and marketers in terms of profit and return on investment. However, research studies on SNS's and how they are perceived by its users are relatively limited, especially how online factors influence users' perceptions and attitudes towards advertising on SNS's. This paper aims to examine the online factors that influence consumers' perceptions and attitudes towards advertising on Facebook. A total of 350 respondents participated in the study. The results suggest that there are three online factors that significantly influence consumers' attitudes towards advertising on Facebook. The factors are perceived interactivity, advertising avoidance and privacy. Surprisingly, credibility was not a significant factor predicting consumer' attitudes towards advertising on Facebook. This paper provides some insights to advertisers into dimensions that may draw consumers' favourable attitudes towards advertising on SNS's, especially Facebook.

Political Advertising and Media: Insights from a Multicultural Society

“…For this reason, print media are often referred to as high-involvement media. This finding is similar to previous research showing that online advertising has the ability to deliver rich information and detail, which is also in line with other traditional media such as print media (Schlosser and Shavitt 1999;Ducoffe 1996;Brackett and Carr 2001;Lei 2000;Yaakop, A et. al 2013).…”

“…Analyzing Facebook content and the extent to which it adheres to such portrayals may both indicate how pervasive such stereotypes are in social media and serve as a first step to future studies of the effects of such portrayals. Although the use of Facebook is increasingly popular, Yaakop, A. et al (2013) argued that consumers have concerns about the credibility of Facebook to disseminate truthful information. Yaakop, A & Hemsley-Brown, J, (2013), however, posited consumers' attitudes towards internet advertising are influenced by the capability of internet advertising to ring and entertainment.…”

User Acceptance of Personalized and Context-Specific Online Advertising

“…Also, customer reactions to online advertising are often interpreted incorrectly due to lack of knowledge and limited research done on consumers' behavior towards online advertising. This causes advertisers to choose an inefficient advertisement strategy and an unclear identification of the target audience [2]. The investigation of user reception on online marketing is of particular relevance in the context of the rise of e-commerce and the associated increased influence of advertising on the consumer in the future.…”

“…In contrast to marketing on TV, radio or print media, internet advertising is much cheaper, quickly to produce and can be flexibly adapted or replaced. Furthermore, the idea of executing content that is up to date and entertaining could get consumers to interact preferably for the respective advertiser [2]. According to Yaakop and Hemsley-Brown [3], this powerful attribute can be seen as a future of advertising and may become less abstract in consumers' minds than TV spots as marketing stimuli.…”

Consumers' attitude toward Facebook advertising

“…Thus, the adoption of a SNS strategy depends on understanding the consumers' behaviour on these platforms, namely their attitude toward ads and brand posts. Although previous studies have investigated advertising avoidance in traditional media and on the internet there has been little research on advertising on SNS (Hodis et al, 2015;Kelly et al, 2010;Yaakop et al, 2013, Zeng et al, 2010. Therefore, this paper aims to contribute to the understanding of consumers' attitude towards advertising on Facebook, as well as toward brands' posts, looking for directions for the definition of effective social media marketing strategies.…”