Living in the Era of social media: How the different types of social media may affect information acquisition process

Abstract

The main objective of this research is to study the role of social media in the information acquisition process. We study social media as «information sources» and we give answer to the question: Do consumers use different types of social media when they seek for pre-purchase information? In order to address this question, firstly we investigate the existence of a typology of social media based on their characteristics as information sources; and we study the factors that affect consumers to use different types of social media during their pre-purchase information acquisition process. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.