The Effect of Social Media Comments on Consumers' Responses to Food Safety Information

摘要

The increasing popularity of social media has prompted the need to examine the effects of social media comments on consumers' responses to food safety information. By adopting and extending a dual-process model, this study assessed the effect of source credibility, the content of comments, and relationship quality on consumer responses to social media comments using a scenario-based survey. The results showed a significant interaction effect between source credibility and content of comments; while negative comments induced negative responses regardless of source credibility, positive, or mixed comments led to less negative responses when the source was highly credible than ivhen the source was less credible. The insignificant effect of relationshipquality signified a stronger influence of the information itself compared to the influence of the relationship quality with the person delivering information.