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ABSTRACT. Facebook has become a very popular channel for companies to promote their brands or products. However, according to a recent study (The Guardian, 2011) Facebook is currently losing users in US, UK, Canada, Norway and Russia. It becomes interesting to find out whether Facebook is really an effective marketing tool. Kietzmann et al. (2011) proposed seven functional building blocks of social media: identity, conversations, sharing, presence, relationships, reputation and groups. This paper aims to find out which of the functional blocks or anything else, is more important for Facebook. Moreover, this paper also aims to find out whether the Facebook users consider fan page plus tab apps should be the most acceptable format, which was regarded as the more successful fan page design by some practitioners. This paper is based a survey on university students’ usage habits on Facebook in Hong Kong to answer these questions. From the results, over 80% of the respondents chose “knowing how are things going on with people I know” as the major reason of using Facebook, which is consistent to previous studies. Among the respondents who have joined fan pages, over half of them claimed the main purpose was “to receive discounts and promotion” or “to get updates on future products.” It is suggested that updating product information and offering sales promotion may be more effective strategies for companies to attract Facebook users. pp. 56–71
JEL codes: M3; Z13; L81

Keywords: Facebook; social media; fan page, advertising; sales promotion

How to cite: Cheung, Fanny Sau-Lan, and Wing-Fai Leung (2016), “Facebook Users’ Habits in Getting Commercial Information: A Study on Hong Kong Students,” Economics, Management, and Financial Markets 11(3): 56–71.

Received 21 May 2015 • Received in revised form 17 February 2016
Accepted 18 February 2016 • Available online 12 March 2016

FANNY SAU-LAN CHEUNG
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Department of Marketing,
City University of Hong Kong
(corresponding author)
WING-FAI LEUNG
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Department of Business Administration,
Chu Hai College of Higher Education

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