Title: Perception of Indian consumers towards social media advertisements in Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and Twitter

Authors: Thamaraiselvan Natarajan; Janarthanan Balakrishnan; Senthil Arasu Balasubramanian; Jeevananthan Manickavasagam

Addresses: Department of Management Studies, National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirapalli – 620015, Tamil Nadu, India ' Department of Management Studies, National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirapalli – 620015, Tamil Nadu, India ' Department of Management Studies, National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirapalli – 620015, Tamil Nadu, India ' Department of Management Studies, National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirapalli – 620015, Tamil Nadu, India

Abstract: The increasing presence of social media in India gives an active advantage to marketers to attract consumers through advertisements, still the Indian consumers perception towards these advertisements remain unexplored. This study aims in exploring consumer perception of beliefs towards social media advertisements in four top social media websites; Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube. The survey was collected from 710 social media users through administered online data collection. For this purpose, seven belief factors; product information, hedonic/pleasure, good for the economy, social role and image, materialism, falsity, and value corruption was employed in the study. To enhance the results as appropriate to the investigation, multivariate analysis of variance was used to identify the difference in belief perception of Indian consumers among the four social media sites. All belief factors exhibited comparatively significant difference among the four social media websites except for the beliefs, materialism and value corruption. It was also identified the belief falsity/no-sense shows a highest significant mean difference between LinkedIn and YouTube. The proposed study helps to understand the foundation of knowledge of Indian consumer perception towards social media advertisements.

Keywords: online consumer behaviour; social media advertising; internet marketing; online marketing; India; consumer perceptions; MANOVA; Facebook; YouTube; LinkedIn; Twitter; social media adverts; belief factors; social networking sites; SNS.

DOI: 10.1504/IJIMA.2014.067662

International Journal of Internet Marketing and Advertising, 2014 Vol.8 No.4, pp.264 - 284

Accepted: 13 Jul 2014
Published online: 07 Mar 2015 *

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