Spreading love through fan page liking: A perspective on small scale entrepreneurs

Abstract

Growing popularity of Facebook has made it a value-adding marketing channel for the small and medium sized businesses. As a marketing medium characterized by low cost and minimum risk it attracts small scale entrepreneurs to utilize this new platform i.e. brand fan page of Facebook as a business communication tool for reaching out to customers. Considering the significance of Facebook as social media marketing platform for businesses and the lack of understanding of this area, the present study investigates whether there exists a significant relationship between brands “liked” on the Facebook fan pages and brand love, word of mouth, and purchase intention from potential buyer perspective. The research was conducted taking five popular small scale entrepreneur backed firms on the basis of the number of likes on their fan pages. Respondents of the survey were followers of fan pages of sampled firms. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was applied using primary data collected from 311 respondents. The study reveals a positive relationship between “liked” brands on Facebook fan-page and brand love. Further, the study finds that liking the fan pages is essentially converted into WOM, and it results into purchase proposition.