Analyzing the Effects of Comments on Social Networking Sites on Consumer Purchasing Decision Process

Abstract

The usage rate of social networking sites have increased in recent years in parallel with the technological improvements and developments experienced in the world. Social networking sites, usage rate of which is increasing in Turkey year by year, play an important role in removing the borders in the world and they are used extensively in the marketing mix. This helps companies to offer their products or services to a large number of people using social networking sites and to reach their marketing goals through their communication environment. Consumers can easily access many information about company, brand or product by using social networking sites and they can influence their purchasing decisions by sharing their ideas and opinions through these sites. For this reason, consumers' positive or negative comments on social networking sites and the power to influence other consumers with these comments are becoming an important phenomenon in terms of strengthening the power already in the hands of the consumers in marketing understanding. From this point, it has been aimed in the study to determine to what extent the positive or negative comments in the social networking sites are effective in determining the need of the consumer purchasing decision process, which are selection of alternatives, evaluation of alternatives, purchase decision and post-purchase evaluation stages. Demographic variables, based on the collected data from 300 participants, were used to investigate the extent to which the consumer purchasing decision process was influenced by comments of social networking sites at different stages. Within the research findings, the comparisons among the participants revealed that different comments of the social networking sites at different stages of the purchasing decision process of different consumer groups were influenced at a level of different demographic variables.