UNIVERSITY OF ECONOMICS HO CHI MINH CITY International School of Business ------------------------------ Tran Ngoc Tu FACTORS AFFECTING WORD-OF-MOUTH: A STUDY OF FACEBOOK FAN PAGES MASTER OF BUSINESS (Honours) Ho Chi Minh City – Year 2014 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com UNIVERSITY OF ECONOMICS HO CHI MINH CITY International School of Business ------------------------------ Tran Ngoc Tu FACTORS AFFECTING WORD-OF-MOUTH: A STUDY OF FACEBOOK FAN PAGES ID: 21110026 MASTER OF BUSINESS (Honours) SUPERVISOR: Dr. Nguyen Thi Mai Trang Ho Chi Minh City – Year 2014 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com ACKNOWLEDGEMENT This thesis could not be accomplished without the help, advise, support, guidance and encouragement of many people. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor, Dr. Nguyen Thi Mai Trang, for her guidance and correction to my thesis, especially for her enthusiasm in quickly answering and support.
Second, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Professor Nguyen Dong Phong, Professor Nguyen Dinh Tho, and Dr. Tran Ha Minh Quan for their valuable time as the members of the proposal examination committee. My sincere thanks are also to all the members of ISB create the best convenience for me as well as ISB students during the course. Thirdly, I would like to thank my dear colleagues, friend and classmates for their invaluable advice, encouragement and help me collect the research data.
Last but not least, I would like to express my great thanks to my family for their encouragement and assistance for my three years study the master course and finish this thesis. i TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com ABSTRACT Vietnam has been one of the fastest growing countries in Internet and social networking sites for years. Facebook is the most popular social media site, nearly 25 million of the 36 million Internet users in Vietnam (VietnamNet, 2014). Understanding the influences of Facebook to the youngster’s behavior, many business organizations build fanpages on the social media site to build better connection with their customers.
Identifying the factors affecting brand wordofmouth through the study of Facebook fanpages can help the organization understanding the motivation of Facebook users who involving in their brand fanpage. As a result, those factors, which have huge impact on the wordofmouth, are Content value (including Functional value and Hedonic value), and Interaction value of the Facebook brand fan page. Therefore this research can help improving business if people know which ones to investment. Keywords: word-of-mouth, brand fan-page, Facebook, Vietnam.
ii TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS EFA Exploratory Factor Analysis KMO KaiserMeyerOlkin WOM WordOfMouth SPSS Statistical Package for the Social Science software SMM Social media marketing SNS Social networking sites B2C Businesstocustomer iii TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com LIST OF TABLES Table 1.1: Top 10 Social Media Sites Among Internet Users in Vietnam, April 2013.2: Functional Variables ItemTotal Statistics .3: Reliability test results .4: Rotated Component Matrix .5: Final Rotated Component Matrix .7: Multiple Regression ANOVA .8: Mutiple Regression Coefficients .9: Simple Regression ANOVA .10: Simple Regression Coefficients. 42 iv TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com LIST OF FIGURES Figure 2.1: Hofstede interculture dimemsions comparision. 45 v TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENT. ii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS .iii LIST OF TABLES.
iv LIST OF FIGURES. Structure of the Research. 6 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW. Social networking sites.
Brand Fanpages. Motivation of Facebook Brand Fan Pages. Fanpage functional value. Fanpage hedonic value.
Social interaction value. Selfconcept value. Word of Mouth. Proposal model and hypotheses.
18 CHAPTER 3: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY. Informants of the study. 20 vi TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail. Sample size and Sampling method.
Data analysis method. 28 CHAPTER 4: DATA ANALYSIS AND RESULTS. General characteristic of the research sample. Reliability test: The Cronbach’s alpha test.
Fanpage functional value. Fanpage hedonic value. Social interaction value. Selfconcept value.
Fanpage usage intensity. WordofMouth. Exploratory factor analysis. Multiple regression analysis.
Assumption 1: The linear relationship. Assumption 2: Homoscedasticity of residuals. Assumption 3: No multicollinearity. Assumption 4: No significant outliers.
Assumption 5: Residuals are normally distributed. Result of multiple regression analysis. Simple regression analysis. Assumption 1: Homoscedasticity of residuals.
Assumption 2: Residuals are normally distributed. Result of simple regression analysis. Hypotheses assessment and discussion. 42 CHAPTER 5: DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION.
46 vii TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail. Social interaction value. Fanpage functional value. Fanpage hedonic value.
59 APPENDIX B: SURVEY RESULTS. 67 APPENDIX C: MULTIPLE LINEAR REGRESSION. 70 APPENDIX D: SIMPLE LINEAR REGRESSION. 73 viii TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1.
Research Background The world is living in the information age and the social networks have unpredictable growth last few years. According to Internet World Stats (2013), there were about 2.8 billion Internet users as of 31 December 2013 worldwide, which increased nearly 676.3%, compare with 361 million Internet users worldwide in 2000. Social networking sites such as Facebook, YouTube, or LinkedIn are playing more important roles in business communications According to McKinsey (2012) there are more than 1.5 billion users on using social networks, 70% companies advocated social media technologies to transform businesses and improve organizational performance.1: Top 10 Social Media Sites Among Internet Users in Vietnam, April 2013. Total Total unique minutes visitors (millions of Total visits (millions) minutes) (millions) 1.7 Source: eMarketer (2013) 1 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com At the same time, Vietnam is one of Facebook fastestgrowing countries in the world last few years.5 million users in October 2012, but in May 2014, Facebook reached nearly 25 million users in the country (VietnamNet, 2014).
Vietnam is adding one million Facebook users per month. Given this rate of growth, Vietnam will hit 30 million by October 2014 (Millward, 2014). Therefore, social networking sites such as Facebook, which have a big impact on Vietnamese people’s lives. Meanwhile in the global trends, the social networks are increasingly replacing traditional media for marketing and communications.
They have become a major factor in influencing various aspects of consumer behavior including awareness, information acquisition, opinions, attitudes, purchase behavior, and postpurchase communication and evaluation (Mangold & Faulds, 2009, p. As such, for business, social networks offer the potential for (1) advertising by facilitating viral marketing, (2) product development by involving consumers in the design process and (3) market intelligence by observing and analyzing the user generated content (Richter et al. The rapid growth of Facebook helps to open the potential of transmitting companies’ marketing messages to their customers and entering into a dialogue with them using the wordofmouth (WOM) principles. Furthermore, business organizations continuously interact and analyze the consumers’ activities on their brand fanpage after setup and maintain them on Facebook.
Social media marketing (SMM), a form of WOM marketing, is an outcome of this trend (Kozinets et al. The SMM is not replacement for the traditional techniques; it is used as additional traditional marketing channel that could be integrated with the traditional ones as a part of the marketing mix. By monitoring and 2 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com analyzing conversations and feedback on Facebook brand fanpage, a company can learn about customers’ needs (Palmer and KoenigLewis, 2009). However, the adoption of Social Media for Marketing in Vietnam is still very new.
The remarkable development and prevalence of social networking sites just in a very short time in Vietnam made a lot of organizations cannot overlook this opportunity. As a consequence, being able to understanding the profound reasons of the engagement of Facebook fanpage, businesspersons need to know what people think and feel from different aspects of an issue. Beneath the participation is the consciousness of benefits, analyzing human psychology toward the new trend can help the managers aware the factors affect to their success. Applying suitable content marketing or integrated marketing for promotion strategy on social networking sites will bring the efficiency for their organization.
To contribute in this direction, in this research we find the factors that influence the level of WOM on Facebook brand fan page. Research Problem The ways people exchange information with each other have been changing dramatically over the last years (HennigThurau et al. The relationships between consumers to each other and to organizations have also transformed by new social media services. Compare to traditional relationships, companies pay active role to reach customers through marketing activities and customers were passive “receivers” of brand messages (Libai et al.
Nowadays, both company and customer involve actively in a “conversation” about the brand, customers can be 3 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com multipliers of brand messages, and creates opportunities for wordofmouth marketing (Kozinetset et al., 2010) SNSs offer customers many services to communicate with others, building up new communication style that users and organizations easily to exchange ideas. Facebook is the largest social networking sites, which offers companies many options to keep contact with their customers or fans. Organizations nowadays utilize these tools to engage their fans and interact with them. Fanpages are created to deliver products’ information, much attractive content and get feedback from consumers (Borle et al.
In Vietnam last few years, many people set up their own business through Internet, particularly on Facebook and they doing marketing and selling things through internet sites. As stated above, Vietnam has very impressive figures about the number of people using social networking sites, so, what makes people get into social networking sites that much and to increase the participation of people into Facebook fanpages, what are necessary things? Besides, the reason of joining in social networking sites stems from different causes, for instance, individuals care for personal interests, while organizations think about their business. Depending on particular purposes and objectives, each subject will develop their account in an appropriate way. As we have seen, today, brand fan pages are ideally for businesses in marketing communication.
However, lack of empirical research on fanpages and its role for the customerbrand relationship. Especially there is lack of empirical study for the consumer motivation to use brand fanpages. 4 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail. Research Objectives Regarding the related research results are already published of social networking sites using motivation and brand communities engagement.
This research aims to identify the key factors of Facebook fanpages affecting consumers’ wordof mouth and the drivers, which make a successful brand fanpages. Specifically, this research will examine: Impact of Fan-pages content (functional & hedonic) on fan-pages usage intensity. Impact of Social Interaction on fan-page usage intensity. Impact of Self-concept on fan-page usage intensity.
Impact of Fan-page usage intensity on Word-of-Mouth. Research Methodology The research method is the combination of qualitative and quantitative research. It helps increase the accuracy and sufficiency of the study. Applying qualitative research to collect the ideas and opinions allows the adjustment of the study is made.
While, the quantitative research guarantees many people take the survey and allows the researcher to carry out the data analysis with more reliable results. Statistical Package for the Social Science software (SPSS), an effective tool to analyze the data, is used in data analysis chapter. The steps are to test the reliability of the scales (Cronbach’s Alpha), Factor Analysis. Finally, the Regression is used to examine the relationship between independents variables and dependent variables.
Research Scope This study is to research the brand fanpages on Facebook, the most popular Social Networking Sites (SNSs) in Vietnam. The survey will be conducted online and 5 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com limited in Vietnamese community. People who response the questionnaire mostly come from the two biggest cities of Vietnam, Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh. Certainly, the respondents of this study must know about Facebook, have created an account on it, and join or like at least one brand fanpages; otherwise, their answers are not qualified and cannot be used in the data analysis.