Viral advertising in social media: Facebook message pass-on behaviour of college students in Hong Kong

This study examines the influences of psychological factors to Facebook message pass-on behaviour of college students in Hong Kong. The effectiveness of internet advertising relies on the fundamental nature of fast spreading of messages over the social networks. As one of the most popular platform of social media, Facebook is comparable to the number three biggest country in the world in term of population. While studies on predictors of attitude and self-disclosure have been done in recent research, literatures revealed that other factors have yet to be addressed. The identified principal gap concerns the influences of commitment, satisfaction, emotion states of users, perceived privacy, and perceived risk to message pass-on behaviour in social media platform. This study focused on the hypotheses that commitment and satisfaction influence message pass-on behaviour, user demographics and emotions have moderating effects to message pass-on behaviour, and lastly emotions, perceived privacy, and perceived risk influence message pass-on behaviour through commitment and satisfaction. A total of 1,500 college students from three higher education institutes in Hong Kong have been invited to participate in the study. Data were collected from 224 college students through anonymous survey. Regression analysis was used to analyse the relationships between the identified predictors and the message pass-on behavior. Results showed that user’s commitment and satisfaction levels have positive influences to Facebook message pass-on behaviour. In addition, the findings showed that emotion of trust and perceived privacy have indirect effects through commitment and satisfaction while Facebook experience of users positively moderates the relationships on commitment and satisfaction to message pass-on behaviour. These findings have theoretical and managerial implications which help marketers and policy makers in developing advertising plans more effectively.