Beliefs and Attitudes Towards Online Advertising in a Social Network Context

Abstract

Social network advertising is a very interesting topic for marketers today for the reason that mass collaboration is influencing consumer’s beliefs and attitudes. The study aims to investigate the relationships among consumers’ beliefs and attitudes towards online advertising on social networks, as well as gender and ethnic responses towards online advertising on social networks. The survey was conducted using a convenience sampling method and a sample size consisting of 420 were realized.

The study found a positive correlation between beliefs about and attitudes towards online advertising. However no significant gender differences were reported for beliefs and attitudes towards online advertising but some significant differences were found between African and Caucasian respondents. It was found that the more positive peoples’ beliefs about online advertising was the more positive was their overall attitude towards online advertising.

Online marketers and managers can eliminate gender as an influencing factor when compiling online marketing strategies as gender has proven to be non-influential factor. Therefore, when advertising on social networks, advertisers may use the same general elements when communicating with male and female audiences. However as significant difference were identified between African and Caucasian students’ beliefs, ethnicity should be taken into account when advertising online. Companies should however focus on the various belief constructs, namely entertainment, information, credibility and economy as it has been proven by the research conducted that a positive correlation exists between these constructs and the attitude that consumers hold towards online advertising on social network sites. The entertainment seeking factor proved to be the strongest predictor of attitudes towards online advertising. Marketers should therefore focus their efforts on creating online advertisements that are enjoyable, pleasing and interesting.

The main limitation of this study was that a non-probability sampling approach was used for the study, therefore the results of the study cannot be generalized to the larger population and ultimately this study needs to be replicated with non-student samples.

The findings could assist marketing professionals to better understand the role of online advertising, an increasingly important dimension of the marketing discipline.