The Impact of Opinion Leadership on the Attitude Change by the Direction of Word-of-Mouth under the Online Social Networking Service Environment

Bomil Suh, Ji Hye Park

Abstract


As the number of online social networking service (SNS) users is increasing, various efforts are being deployed to take advantage of SNS from the perspective of business and management. Especially, researches in the field of marketing such as word-of-mouth (WOM) effect have been actively conducted. This paper examined the impact of the SNS messages of users' friends on the users' attitude and the moderating effect of the friends' opinion leadership on the WOM effect. Fifty-one Facebook users responded to the questions on their four friends each. Regression analyses showed that there existed WOM effect under the SNS environment and the opinion leadership of the message creators positively moderated the WOM effect. We discussed the contributions and implications of this study.

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