The Impact Of Social Media-generated Content Interaction On Consumers’ Brand Trust

Social media has become a comprehensive promotion form under integrated marketing communication,helping enterprises to establish a strong relationship with their consumers.It has become an important topic to use social media content and user relationship to better stimulate consumers’ trust in brands.Previous studies focused on exploring the different impacts of content from one certain source on consumers on the social media platform,ignoring the interaction between user generated content and professional generated content.What brand recognition will be generated when consumers browse these two types of content? What is the difference between different sources and different types of content? Based on the Parasocial Interaction Theory and Persuasion Knowledge Model,this study explored the influence and internal mechanism of the interaction between PGC and UGC on brand trust by constructing different social media platform scenarios,and further explored the boundary of this effect.In order to explore and verify the above problems,this study designed three studies targeted at different social media platforms.By simulating the situation of Weibo,study 1 found that PGC has significant interaction with the UGC.When consumers browse the context environment formed by PGC and UGC,different content type combinations have different effects on consumers’ brand trust perception.Specifically,the combination of experiential PGC and emotional UGC can better stimulate consumers’ brand trust,and the combination of promotional PGC and informational UGC can better stimulate consumers’ brand trust.Study 2 simulating the situation of Xiaohongshu to explore the internal mechanism of the interaction influence of PGC and UGC on brand trust.The persuasion knowledge model shows that consumers’ persuasion knowledge may be activated by some marketing behaviors of merchants,and the persuasion knowledge can be used to determine what strategies marketers will adopt to achieve their motivation.Such perception of manipulation intention will lead to consumers’ resistance to marketing content,resulting in poor brand evaluation.The matching between PGC and UGC will reduce consumers’ perception of manipulation intention,thus enhancing their trust in brands.Based on the video form of Bilibili,Study 3 verified that the matching strategy between PGC and UGC is valid only when the relationship between PGCer and UGCer is strong.On the theoretical level,this paper focuses on the phenomenon of multi-party interaction prevalent on social media platforms,fills the gap in existing literature on social media marketing research,analyzes the generated content of social media influencers and ordinary users,and expands the research scope of content marketing in social media marketing.On the practical level,this study provides an operational plan for enterprises to use social media to enhance brand value and gain consumer trust,and has an important guiding role for enterprises to carry out content marketing and word-of-mouth marketing.