earticle

영어

Social media platforms are proliferating with continuing advances in Web2.0 and social networking technologies. Microblogging is becoming increasingly popular vis-à-vis other social media because of features such as interactivity, disintegration of central authority, and capacity of being widely duplicated and disseminated. Currently, the Chinese mainland is home to more than 300 million microblog users who include leaders of all walks of life: influencers, celebrities, public officials, and all types of organizations. In addition, more than 200,000 enterprises have pages on varied microblogging platforms. The impact of microblogging has increased dramatically since its introduction to mainland China in 2009. Like other forms of digital social media, microblogs are transforming information dissemination channels used by enterprises to reach their customers, transfiguring the pathways of dialog and converting the modes through which enterprises influence their customers. An increasing number of organizations, media persons, and scholars are now utilizing microblogging’s disseminative features for accurate and low-cost marketing drives. Scholars of microblog marketing usually attend more to the effects of brand awareness, information quality, and customer interactions on the online purchase intentions of customers, tending to underestimate the importance of entrepreneurial microblogs. The attributes of Chinese microblogging platforms and their foreign counterparts are significantly different. Hence, this study explored the effects of the three variables of brand awareness, information quality, and customer interaction on the perceived value and trust of Chinese microblog users, adding the entrepreneurial viewpoint as a new fourth variable. A popular microblogging website formed the research platform for this study conducted through in-depth interviews of microblogging users to ascertain the influence of the abovementioned four factors on microblogging marketing efforts undertaken by enterprises.