Abstract:

This academic study aims to show the impact of social media on Turkish students’ attitudes toward online advertising and their behavioural response. Therefore this study will reveal the influence of consumers’ attitudes toward social media advertising and its impact on their advertising clicking and furthermore buying intention. To create a statistically significant test pool, 400 university students of the Adnan Menderes university, Faculty of Economic and Administrative Sciences in Aydın/Turkey were randomly chosen and the data was analysed with SPSS version 18. A proposed model of belief, attitude and behavioural response, in the context of social media advertising, was tested along with the PCA (Principle component analysis) to support the model. The following four factors, ‘Belief about social media advertising’, ‘Attitude toward social media advertising, ‘AdClicking’ and ‘OnlineBuying’ were tested. The aim of this study was to reveal that a positive belief about social media advertising leads to an affirmative attitude toward social media advertising which significantly influences consumers’ advertising clicking behaviour which at the same time can have a favorable impact on their buying behaviour from the internet. The results of this study should be considered important for Turkish companys’ marketing strategies which aim to go online to sell their products or services to their target customers through social media channels (e.g. facebook, twitter etc.).

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