Preference Of Purchase Sharing Intention On SNSs: Phenomenon And Mechanism

The rapid development of information technology has led to the transformation of social interaction methods.Based on mobile communication technology the social networking sites(SNSs)came into being and has changed the way of people living and information sharing.At the same time,SNSs also encourage users to participate in the sharing behavior and then generate a lot of user-generated content(UGC),which increases the way of information distribution and expands the channels of information communication.The UGC reflects the psychological and behavioral preferences of the information sharer,especially regarding the sharing of consumer content,which can provide theoretical support for social marketing and help merchants to accurately market on SNSs.Therefore,it is a very important topic to deeply explore the sharing behavior of consumers on SNSs and to grasp the sharing characteristics and psychological processes of consumers.To gain a deep insight of sharing behavior on SNSs,we investigate what type of purchase(material purchase vs.experiential purchase)people would like to share on SNSs.Based on the research topic,this paper mainly includes three parts:(1)to explore consumers' sharing preferences between different purchase types on SNSs;(2)to explore the mechanism behind the phenomenon based on the differences of sharing intention,that is,to verify the mediating role of social approval between the relationship of purchase type and sharing intention(3)to explore the influencing factors of sharing preferences of different categories of people,that is,the role of self-monitoring in regulating the social appreciation and sharing willingness of social networking sites.Based on the results of this research,the following conclusions can be drawn.SNSs users have a higher sharing intention on experiential purchases rather than material purchases.Experiential purchases have a higher social approval than material purchases,and thus,lead to higher sharing intention on SNSs.The impact of purchase type on SNSs users' sharing intention depends on their self-monitoring level.Users in high selfmonitoring show a more significant difference in sharing intention between two purchase types in compare with users in low self-monitoring.This study expands the research on users' behavior on social networking sites,and is valuable for the merchants to choose the appropriate marketing strategy according to its product attributes.