ANTECEDENTS OF FACEBOOK FAN PAGE LOYALTY: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY OF SRI LANKAN FACEBOOK USERS

Abstract

Since the birth of Web 2.0 technologies to the world, the Social media & Social networking sites have reportedly been playing a significant role. As a result of this, Facebook, today, has become the most visited website in the world and has topped the rankings in the Sri Lankan contexts as well. Given that Facebook provides a wider opportunity for business users in order to promote their businesses among the target market by means of custom pages, Facebook Fan Pages could now be identified as one of the major promotional tools, proven to be effective locally, as well as internationally. Thus, Facebook page loyalty could be identified as a significant factor for the survival and growth of any brand.Therefore, this study focuses on investigating the antecedents of Facebook Fan Page Loyalty with special reference to Sri Lankan Facebook Users. As per the extensive literature reffered, Perceived Ease of Use, Perceived Usefulness, Brand Love, Attitude, Trust and Privacy Risk were chosen as antecedents of Fan Page Loyalty. The study was quantitative in nature whereas thecross-sectional survey design was chosen as the overall research design. Data was collected using a structured questionnaire and analyzed using Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) method. Findings of the study revealed that there is a significant impact of all variables in concern on the Facebook page loyalty. However, it was also explored that out of them, the factor ‘Attitude’ is the most influential to Facebook page loyalty in Sri Lanka. Thus, it can be concluded, based on the research, that positive attitude towards the Facebook Fan page is a powerful predictor of satisfaction with the fan page, and vice versa as well.