The Extent of Facebook Users’ Interest in the Advertising Messages

摘要

Social network websites are used by most people nowadays. Out of these websites, Facebook in particular is widely used in commercial promotion, specifically due to the high availability of its advertising messages. These advertising messages are intended to promote products and services of companies using those websites. This study aims to identify the extent to which Facebook users are interested in the advertising messages published via this website, in addition to trying to identify the effect of these messages on users` purchasing willingness, and how users evaluate Facebook as a medium of advertising. In order to achieve said aims, five hypotheses were formulated, tested, and dully validated. To achieve the above mentioned objectives the research designed a self administered questionnaire which was sent to sample via Facebook for a period of one month. 384 respondents filled up the questionnaire out of which only 320 questionnaires were usable for the present study, which represent 83% of the overall number of questionnaires. Later on, the data was statistically analyzed through Gronpach's alpha, and one-sample t-test. The main conclusion of present study is that the interest of Facebook users in advertising messages is very high. This induces users to purchase products promoted via Facebook as those messages are seen as very credible.