An Empirical Study On The Impact Of Electronic Word-of-mouth In Social Media On Consumer Behavioral Intention

With the development of Internet and the rise of variety interactive platforms, social media stand out with its unique features. O n one hand, with a great number of users and large amount of user generated content, social media has become one of the factors that influence consumer buying behavior. O n the other hand, the discussions and sharings in social media, actively contributed to the generation of marketing content. At the same time, users generated information will stimulate and influence consumers’ purchase behavior. However, most researchers focused on what influences social media have made on consumer behavior, while ignored how.As comments and recommendation on social media towards product or service can be seen as electronic word-of- mouth, a empirical research based on the theory of planned behavior was done to explore the influence of social media information on consumers search willingness and purchase intention. Research methods include literature and relative theories review, questionnaire survey and statistical analysis. Data was collected through survey and was analyzed using structural equation model by Smart PLS software. The results indicated that in social media, perceived information usefulness, perceived reliability of friends, attitude, perceived behavioral control, social media friends opinions would directly or indirectly, impact users’ search willingness and purchase intention.There are two innovation points in this research. First, the user generated content in social media was regarded as electronic word-of- mouth, which will affect consumer behavior and purchase decision- making. Second, consumer behavior was divided into two dimensions, search and purchase respectively. In the last part of the paper, management implications and practice suggestions was put forward based on the empirical analysis results.