A Study of Factors of Motivation for Forwarding Content in Social Media and Determining the Influence of Mavens of Social Media: Evidence from Face-Book
Keywords:
Forwarders, Facebook, Reach, Influence, Motivational Factor, Emotional Appeal, MavensAbstract
Impetus for this study came from the fact that technology, social media and digital has become crucial for the success of any organization and therefore better customer engagement content and dissemination of information is of great import. Objective was to identify motivational factors that drive an individual to share or post content in a social network. Relation between emotional appeals in the content and its significance on motivational factors which may drive the individual to share the content was examined. This study proposes modeling the influence of an individual in sharing the content which would enable content creation and distribution of the content amongst effective mavens to create an e-buzz which may further lead to a viral campaign. It can be used by an industry for digital marketing. Theoretical framework was derived from secondary study of published researches on viral marketing, seeding strategies, design of content and cultural and emotional aspects embedded in content. This is an empirical study wherein a scaled questionnaire was used to understand as to how emotional appeals affect the levels of motivational drives .A random sample of 145 respondents within the city of Bangalore and within the set age group of 18-35 was considered to gather data and the data so collected was analyzed using SPSS and excel. Study provided empirical insights as to how different emotional appeals correspond to different motivational factors for sharing content in social media.It suggests what type of emotional appeals should be included in the content to motivate sharing and trigger popularity. A model was created which would assist in measuring the influence of an individual in sharing and identify mavens.
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