SNSs Advertising Value

Abstract: Introduction: Scholars considered advertising within the SNSs’ as one of the crucial integrated communication tools within the recent few years, due to the cost reduction, its efficiency in reaching the targeted market, in addition SNSs give wider access to new markets as they have high penetration value worldwide. Therefore, many companies consider the SNSs as an essential marketing tool in both local and international markets. Problem & Purpose: Due to the identified shortage in the earlier studies about measuring the Social Network Sites (SNSs) advertising value, the present authors found the reasons for why it is important to identify the factors affecting the SNSs users’ perception of SNSs’ ad value. The main purpose for the authors was to identify and explore the related factors to the SNSs’ ad value and to measure the SNSs’ users' perception to those factors. Theoretical Framework: The gap in the SNSs ad value theories as identified from the literature review, made the authors built their own model based on Duccoff’s (1996) model, which was later developed according to other literature related to the online ad value. Then ten hypotheses were created to test the correlation between the new model variables. Methodology & Analysis: In this exploratory research, the authors used the quantitative approach to collect the empirical data through distributing a survey to the university students in Halmstad University. To analyze the collected data both descriptive and correlation analyses were used, which helped to achieve the research purpose and to test the new model. Conclusion: By analyzing the empirical data the authors concluded that the SNSs’ users from the Swedish university students were more information oriented, males were more interactive with SNSs ad than females but in general both genders were more irritated and less trusting to the SNSs’ ads. The ten tested hypotheses proved the efficiency of the created model; even so, further research with different market segments may support the conceptual framework model as recommended by this research. Key Words: Advertising value, I-marketing, Personal characteristics, Personal orientation, SNSs