Impact Of Social Media On Customer Satisfaction

With the rapid development of e-commerce, the overall volume has been growing fast yearly. Whereas, e-commerce players are facing a more fierce competition contending for existing customers as the growth of online shoppers is stablizing. Besides, today customers have multiple alternatives to shop online, lifting customer satisfaction is of more great practical significance for e-commerce players to win. Previous e-commerce customer satisfaction researches have focused more on how e-commerce websites affect customer making decisions. With the popularization of Web 2.0, e-commerce platforms are introducing social networks to facilitate customers'decision making through embedding social media. Scholars called this emerging business model as social commerce. In social commerce context, both traditional e-commerce websites and social media affect customer satisfaction, however social media and the underlying social influences receive little attention in the literature.Integrating theories and studies of social capital and computer-mediated communication, this study develops a model that explains the impact of social media attributes on customer satisfaction in social commerce context. Social media is a typical CMC tool with both social and media characteristics. With social media, customers would feel like communicating and conducting social interaction with "real" people, which could enhance social relationships development. Social capital refers to the sum of the actual and potential resouces for social actions which is embedded within and available through both online and offline social networks. Social capital could facilitate customers'sharing knowledge and experiences about products and shopping, leading to accurater and more informative purchases to meet requirements and higher satisfaction consequently. Social capital contained in social networks of social media is the key factor influencing customer satisfaction. Therefore, this paper proposes that the effect of social media attributes on customer satisfaction is mediated through social capital. Based on data collected from 298 social commerce buyers, the research model was tested using partial least squares (PLS) structural equation modeling technique throuth SmartPLS 2.0 and SPSS. The empirical results show that the positive effect of social presence and interactivity on customer satisfaction is fully mediated through shared vision (cognitive capital), trust and norms of reciprocity (relational capital). Besides, product prices play a moderating role in the relationship between social interaction ties and customer satisfaction. When the price is high, there is significant positive association between social interaction ties and customer satisfaction.This paper explains the important role of social media on customer satisfaction in social commerce context theoritically, i.e. social presence and interactivity could influence the attainment of social capital to enhance customer satisfaction; identifies that key roles of facets of social capital underlying satisfaction formation, i.e. cognitive and relational capital have a direct impact on lifting satisfaction and relationship of structural capital and satisfaction is moderated by prices. Theoratically, this study examines social media from a "system" perspective providing a new lens for IT behaviors and IT artifacts researches. Furthermore, the research contributes to extending the social capital theory and customer satisfaction literature. For practical implications, the results suggest that e-commerce platform runners should value social media as an effective tool in facilitate the construction of customers'social networks and attainment of social capital; product designers could improve the social media's capability through promoting social presence and interactivity to enhance social interaction.