Does Social Media Presence Increase Consumer Trust in CPG Companies?
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Date
2018-05
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Publisher
The Ohio State University
Abstract
In 2014, 92% of marketers claimed that social media marketing was important for their business, and 80% indicated that their efforts increased traffic to their websites (DeMers, 2014). Moreover, social networks and apps are the highest area of investment for firms in the digital marketing sector (Tiago & Verissimo, 2014). The utilization of social media by companies is not only important to increase brand visibility, it also can play a huge role in how customers perceive the company, specifically, consumer trust. The goal of this research is to further understand the relationship between a company's social media presence and its relationship to consumer trust. For this purpose, data was collected for 30 consumer packaged goods firms over four months and included daily social media information (such as number of likes and followers) from the firms' Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube pages. This data was then used to develop a social media index to base online presence. Additionally, 548 Amazon Mechanical Turk participants were surveyed to measure consumer trust and familiarity for these 30 companies. Results of this research show that social media presence, when used in a model along with familiarity, is not a reliable predictor of consumer trust. However, when social media presence alone is used, it is a reliable predictor of trust in medium sized companies, but not in large or small companies. Thus, we recommend proceeding with caution and having the company itself validate whether social media is affecting its own consumer trust since some companies are more affected by social media than others.
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Keywords
marketing, consumer behavior, consumer trust, social media