Impact of eWOM in Social Networking Sites on Purchasing Intention in Fast Food Restaurant Industry: A Study among Facebook Users

Abstract

With the increasing usage of social media apps, the rate of TV viewership is declining, and online ad blocking is taking place with providing implications to businesses for finding alternative ways of approaching their target audiences. Therefore, marketers find new ways to reach potential customers via social networking sites (SNS) to promote their brands. With the aforesaid background, this study is designed to explore the impact of eWOM in SNS on the purchase intention of Facebook users in the context of the fast-food restaurant industry in Sri Lanka. This study adopts a positivist research paradigm with the deductive research approach and employed self-administrated questionnaires to gather primary data from the conveniently selected sample in the Western province of Sri Lanka. The regression analysis and several statistical techniques have been adopted to analyze the collected data to achieve meaningful conclusions. Overall results revealed that eWOM positively affects purchase intention and found that credible influencers and useful content are vital for the success of eWOM marketing, which affects the fast-food restaurants' performance in Sri Lanka. Therefore, the study outcomes encourage marketers to harness the opportunities that SNS create for businesses and encourage them to develop viral marketing campaigns to spread C2C eWOM to improve purchase intentions. Hence, overall implications indicate positive commercial and economic impact in the present context, even though some limitations are associated with the study.