On Consumer’s Information Seeking Behavior Under Social Media Environment

Social media is a new online media which gives users’a great participation space, it makes the web not a large and rigid set of sites any more, and information flows freely among the invisible human relations. With the development of social media recently, consumers’ information seeking behavior is undergoing tremendous changes. Compared to traditional media, consumers’ information seeking through social media is more personal, situational, interactive, and more effective.User information behavior is the research focus of Information Science, while as a particular type of information user, consumers’ information seeking behavior had been received continuous and widely concerns and study. This dissertation comprehensively reviews the basic concepts and theories of consumers’ information seeking behavior and social media, and reveals the law of consumers’ information seeking behavior under social media environment from the perspective of whole and ongoing process of information seeking. Taking social media as research background is of great theoretical significance for broadening the research perspective and developing the research method of information seeking behavior. Meanwhile, the in-depth understanding of consumers’ information seeking behavior under social media environment is of important practical significance for improving consumers’ network information seeking experience, building an user-centric optimized network information resources environment and the realization of the effective organization and utilization of network information resources.The dissertation is divided into two phases of theoretical and empirical studies. In theoretical studies, the elements and types of social media as well as the elements, strategies and process model of information seeking behavior were concluded through literature study. Among the basic theory above, the features and elements of social media is the basic which affecting the elements levels, the strategies and the process of information seeking. Empirical study consists of three parts. In the first part, the influence of the rise of social media on consumer information seeking behavior was analyzed. In the second part, some specific issues of consumers’ information seeking behavior from the multiple perspectives of Cognitive Behavior Theory, Information Communication and Information Economic Analysis were discussed. In the third part, the consumers’ information seeking behavior model under social media environment was constructed. The specific research includes:Firstly, introduce the research background and significance, summarize the research status, identify the research objectives and contents, research methods and technical route, and proposed the innovation of this paper.The second chapter describes the definition, elements, strategies and behavioral models of consumer information seeking behavior, the definition, development overview, features and types of social media, also analyses social trends of consumers’ information seeking behavior.Chapter Ⅲ, explores the influences of social media on consumers information seeking behavior from four aspects of consumers, information sources and organizations, information seeking process, and information seeking strategies using depth interviews and Grounded Theory,Chapter Ⅳ, builds the influencing factors model of consumers’ pre-purchase and post-purchase information seeking intent based on TAM by introducing variables of social media features, perceived risk and seeking motivation. The final model of consumer information seeking intent was proposed by questionnaires and SPSS data analysis.Chapter Ⅴ, constructs the information seeking behavior pattern research framework which consists of four levels of information seeking behavior subject, object, information seeking itself and the environment. The components are the relationship and interaction between social media users, seeking capabilities, seeking contents, seeking strategies, seeking obstacles, seeking efforts and advanced seeking. Through the two-stage clustering analysis on the survey data, the typical consumers’ information seeking behavior patterns under social media environment were divided.Chapter Ⅵ, sets search tasks of different difficulty levels, chooses representative research platform and carries out information seeking experiment. The consumers’ information seeking efficiency under social media and traditional network environment, as well as the efficiency of different social seeking strategies were compared by analyzing the quantitative and qualitative indicators of the experimental data from five types of information seeking strategies perspective, which is searching, browsing, monitoring, encountering and inquiring.Chapter Ⅶ, discusses the concept of social sharing and related theoretical issues, accessing research data from artificial platform, comparatively analyzes the effect of the consumers’community status, the strength of the relationship between consumers, and the information amount of the social sharing on consumer information search effectiveness, and probes the mechanism of consumers’ social sharing in their information seeking behavior.Chapter Ⅷ, taking the relationships and interactions in social media, consumers’information seeking intent, information seeking patterns, information seeking efficiency, and social sharing behavior as study variables, establishes the consumers’information seeking behavior model under social media environment by using structural equation modeling approach based on the previous empirical research.Finally, summarizes the dissertation by summarizing the conclusions from four aspects of the understanding of social search, the awareness of social media environment, consumers and their seeking strategies under social media environment, consumers’information seeking behavior models. The theoretical contributions and practical implications, the directions and prospects of further research according to the inadequacies of the study were also proposed in this part.The research is based on the user-centered paradigm, which combines the everyday life information seeking research perspective with the problem-solving research perspective, and also combines with the Cognitive Behavior Theory, Information Communication Theory and Information Economy Analysis of multiple perspectives of consumers’ information seeking behavior study. Information seeking behavior was viewed as a dynamic and continuous process, so the pre-seeking, during-seeking and after-seeking behaviors have been involved in this study from the whole information search process perspective, which in some degree reflects the innovative research work of this study.