Research Of Opinion Leaders’ Impact On Information Adoption

Social commerce is the combination of social network and E-business, and it has developed quickly in the past few years. Some research paper shows that social factors contribute to consumers’purchase intention, social shopping has became a new shopping model. According to the prediction of Booz & Company, transaction amount of social commerce will increase to 30 billion by 2015. E-WOM plays a vital role in social commerce, the sender send E-WOM to the consumer, and it leads to an important impact on the information adoption behavior and purchase intention of the consumers.In social commerce, opinion leaders are main information sources of E-WOM. Opinion leader is someone who shares information of the products or service online and influences the behavior of others. Marketing with opinion leaders has more advantages than traditional measures. First, opinion leaders are more trustworthy than advertising for the consumers. Second, the marketing cost of opinion leader is very cheap.We reviewed the literature of social commerce, WOM and opinion leader. Then, we analyzed the feature of opinion leaders and the relationship between opinion leaders and consumers. Based on the communication process theory, information quality and adoption model as well as tie strength theory, we proposed a new model to research the influence of opinion leaders on consumers.We used questionnaire for investigation and the sample is students of Nanjing University. The questionnaire contains two parts:the first part is some basic information such as demographic characteristics and the other part is constructs measurement. After data collection, we used Spss 16.0 to analyze the data, including the descriptive statistical analysis, the reliability and validity analysis, factor analysis, regression and so on.The research shows that produce involvement and expertise quality of opinion leaders have positive effects on information adoption of consumers, and information usefulness has a positive effect on information adoption of consumer. The information usefulness is the mediation of opinion leaders’ produce involvement, expertise quality and information adoption of consumers. Besides, tie strength is a moderator variable between expertise quality and information adoption.There are some contributions of our article. First, the research results will help the sellers with the reduction of marketing cost and the improvement of economic performance. Second, it helps the consumers to increase search efficiency, reduce search cost and avoid risk. Third, there is some suggestion for E-business websites to increase user traffic, user engagement and economic return.