An Empirical Research On The Relation Between Weibo Content,Customer Trust And B2C Preference

Weibo has changed from an instant messaging tool to a comprehensive online social network platform. And currently more and more companies are taking Weibo as an online marketing platform. E-Commerce (short for E-commerce) are also doing so.B2C is one of the EC segments which has the most fierce competition. Currently, T-Mall and JD has dominated more than half of the B2C market share, and the top-10B2C companies has dominated90%of the whole market. From2009, B2C companies gradually registered their official Weibo account. But till now, we are still not sure to what extent that the content of Weibo could raise the trust of a Weibo fans and to what extent that content could convert a Weibo fans to a regular customers of their B2C website.This dissertation will focus on the content of Weibo. We divide the content into four groups:the content from the company, the content from the media, the content from the customer and the interaction content. The first three dimension is something that the fans would receive passively from the company Weibo, and is grouped according to the information source. The last dimension is something that the fans could get actively through negotiation on the company Weibo. Then the dissertation elaborates the relationship between the content of Weibo, the trust of the fans and their preference of the B2C channel with theoretical analysis and build the model. After empirical research, we get three conclusions. The first one is that all the content of Weibo could raise the trust of the consumers. The second one is that only the content from the customers and interaction content could raise the B2C preference. The last one is that there is no direct relationship between the trust of the Weibo and the B2C preference.Based on these conclusions, we would like to give B2C companies three suggestions. The first one is to keep updating the company Weibo. Only by then could the fans trust more about the Weibo. The second one is to put more effort on interacting with the fans and reply the question of the consumers in time. The last one is to pay more attention to the overall development of the B2C channel, which also includes the quality of the goods, the security of the online shopping process, the delivery speed and etc.