Research On The Influence That Self-Expression Made On The Willingness Of Donation And Sharing Of Consumer In Social Media

Recently,with the increasing popularity and the influence of social media,more and more corporations choose to do some online charitable activities through social media.They want to arouse the participation and sharing of consumer widely,but the result is unsatisfactory.Consumers may ignore the activities' information directly or be suspicious of corporations' motivation.In the low trust situation,how to design the charitable activities has becoming a concern and confusion for enterprises.The traditional virtue views believe that it is good to do some well things without a name("Yinde"),but the sharing behavior in social media is to spread it to public("Yangde").This conflict is magnified in social media.Existing research shows that the main motivation for consumers to use social media is self-expression,so how does the self-expression affect consumers' willingness to donate and share under the low trust in social media is our research question.This research finds out the impact of self-expression on consumer donation and willingness to share through three studies.In the first study,the typical socially useful activity “Children's Gallery” is used to obtains texts through interviews and online comments.We want to analyze the factors affecting consumer donation and forwarding behavior,demonstrates whether self-expression motivation have a positive effect on the public welfare activities,and discuss the effect and the boundary conditions through text analysis.The results reveal that self-expression in social media also has positive impact on consumer donation and forwarding in public welfare activities.Trust is a key variable for consumers to participate in public welfare activities.Self-expression and trust effect the donation and willingness to share of consumers.The second and third study use the experimental method to demonstrate the relationship between trust,self-expression and the willingness to donate and share.This research is conducted by the experimental with 2(trust: high vs.low)x 2(self-expression: high vs.low)discuss the impact of high and low self-expression on donation and willingness to share,the mechanism of action under different levels of trust.The results show that:(1)trust and self-expression interaction affect consumers' willingness to donate and share.In the high trust(vs.low trust)situation,the willingness to donate is higher,there is no significant difference in the impact of self-expression on donation and willingness to share.However,in the low trust situation,high self-expression(vs.low self-expression)can significantly increase consumers' willingness to donate and share.(2)In the low trust situation,perceived joviality mood plays a mediational role between self-expression and willingness to donate.And taste expression plays a mediating role between self-expression and willingness to share.The results of this study can provide ideas for the design of corporate charitable activities.When designing online public welfare activities in social media,enterprises can enhance consumers' self-expression perception in the process of participating in public welfare activities by means of the free choice and generating exclusive sharing charts.This can effectively improve consumers' willingness to donate and forward in the low trust situation.