E-Commerce Advertising in Social Networking Sites and Implications for Social Commerce

The proliferation of social media platforms, especially the social networking sites (SNSs), has been changing customers’ online purchasing habits during the last decades. Recently, online marketers not only release advertising on e-commerce platforms but also promote their products and services on social media platforms. In this study we focus on e-commerce adverting in SNSs. We believe that customers are willing to adopt the advertising information published on SNSs for their purchase related decisions making because they trust those platforms and the advertising posted on them. With this research, we seek to explore the relation between customers’ trust in SNSs, customers’ trust in advertising information posted on the sites and customers’ intentions of adopting advertising information to make purchase related decisions. We believe that if an individual trusts the social networking site he/she uses, he/she will trust the advertising information published on it and have intentions to adopt the information to make purchase related decisions. An online survey with 134 subjects shows that trust can be transferred from SNSs to the advertising information posted on the platforms and subjects have intentions to adopt that information to make purchase related decisions. The study also discusses the implications for social commerce, focusing on commercial activities mediated by social media.