The Research On The Influence Of Social Network Sites On Customer Brand Attitude

With the development of the modern society, Internet is not just a part of lifewhich people almost cannot live without, it keeps playing a much more important role.Including80%of Fortune500companies, a large number of enterprises set up officialpages on different kind of social media, especially on popular social network sites,establishing a new online promotion channel, rather than mainly relying on traditionalonline media in the past. The existing researches mainly focus on the media, which iswebsite in this case, focus on the influence on customers attitude and intentionbrought by the website, this study started a new point of view, mainly discussing theinfluence brought by the user group, the influence of information transmitted betweenusers and users’ react on these information, rather than studying the website.Researching the influence on brand attitude of social network sites’ user could helpunderstanding the using motivation and influencing factors that really matters, thenbetter using social networks sites as a tool of online marketing, which is of greatimportance both theoretically and practically.This study is separated into two major parts. The first one is based on the theoryof social behavior, first defines the social network sites, trust and brand attitude, thengives a literature review of the research contents. The literature review contains theanalysis of the influence of social network sites on customers’ attitude, adding trust asa mediating variable， exploring how tie strength and homogeneity directly influenceSNS users’ brand attitude. With the addition of normative influence and informationalinfluence, the mechanism model of the influence of social network sites on customers’brand attitude is constructed, with trust as the intermediary variable by theoreticalanalysis. Based on the above proposal, an anonymous questionnaire is designed tostudy the social network sites users from different city of the country and then usesthe reliability analysis, validity analysis, multivariate variance analysis, structuralequation modeling analysis to statistical analyzes the sample data through using thestatistical analysis software of SPSS20.0and LISREL8.7.Based on the analyzing results, the scales have high levels of reliability andvalidity; Tie strength, homogeneity and normative influence have significant effectson trust, through which then influence the brand attitude, together with theinformational influence; On the other hand, according to the second part of empirical research, ambiguous virtual presence produces equivalent brand attitude tohomogeneous similar virtual presence and heterogeneous virtual presence, andsignificantly more positive brand attitude than homogeneous dissimilar virtualpresence. The last part of the research proposes some management recommendationsto the companies which would like to choose social network sites as one of the mainonline marketing tools to do promotion better in the future, and gives somepperspectives which could be completed in future related studies, based on the resultof the modified structural equation model and the control experiments.