The Impact of Digital Social legitimization on Website Visits and Web Sales

Abstract

The present manuscript examines the role of digital social influence, as attained through Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, and YouTube, in attracting customers and achieving sales performance. The theoretical mechanism that serves as the basis for the study is social legitimacy theory. Specifically, the influence exerted by social media, and the resulting social legitimization of the marketer, are expected to drive both website visits and, ultimately, sales for the USA’s largest e-commerce retailers. The findings indicate that that all five manifest social media indicators converge into a single variable with significant loadings. This provides support for the multidimensional nature of the hypothesized digital social l egitimization construct. However, the structural equations analysis indicates that there is not a direct link between digital social l egitimization and Web sales performance. Nevertheless, digital social l egitimization does in fact positively impact website visits. In turn, these visits are associated with higher e-commerce sales.