Abstract

Issues like advertising credibility and privacy trust have become the hot topics for social networking sites (SNSs) of late. In spite of the critiques, the trend of employing SNS’s as advertising platform by marketing practitioners is still on the rise. This approach of adopting SNS’s probably suits marketers’ objectives to reach and communicate their users and potential customers with relevant ads and personalized messages. Besides, this approach is expected to increase the value of advertising for both users and marketers in terms of profit and return on investment. However, research studies on SNS’s and how they are perceived by its users are relatively limited, especially how online factors influence users’ perceptions and attitudes towards advertising on SNS’s. This paper aims to examine the online factors that influence consumers’ perceptions and attitudes towards advertising on Facebook. A total of 350 respondents participated in the study. The results suggest that there are three online factors that significantly influence consumers’ attitudes towards advertising on Facebook. The factors are perceived interactivity, advertising avoidance and privacy. Surprisingly, credibility was not a significant factor predicting consumer’ attitudes towards advertising on Facebook. This paper provides some insights to advertisers into dimensions that may draw consumers’ favourable attitudes towards advertising on SNS’s, especially Facebook.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.