Abstract

The online social networking services (SNS) have been growing as the means of communication. In this study, we investigated word-of-mouth (WOM) effect under the SNS environment and evaluated the impact of message sender's influence on the WOM effect. Especially, this study focused on the betweenness centrality calculated through the social network analysis (SNA) of SNS network information, and proposed it as the measure of WOM message sender's influence, SNA may provide more accurate and objective measures than subjective self-reporting survey method. Fifty-one Facebook users responded to each of their four Facebook friends, who had been selected based on their betweenness centrality, Statistical analyses were performed using the responses and the betweenness centralities of the Facebook friends. The results showed that the direction (positive vs, negative) of a WOM message in SNS had an impact on the attitude of the message receiver toward the product. Moreover, the betweenness centrality of the message sender as well as his/her opinion leadership had a moderating effect on the WOM effect. Opinion leadership is a measure that has been frequently used for indicating the influence of WOM message sender in the previous studies. Considering the result that the betweenness centrality of the message sender was Significantly correlated to his/her opinion leadership, the betweenness centrality can be used for indicating the influence of WOM message sender.

Keywords

• Social Networking Service(SNS);
• Social Network Analysis(SNA);
• Centrality;
• Influential;
• Word-of-Mouth(WOM) Effect