The Mediating Role of Trust on Social Media Review and Digital Product Purchasing Behavior among Libyan students

Abstract

Over the last few decades, social media has dramatically changed human communication and purchasing behaviour. The impact of social media reviews has tremendously captured scholars’ attention. Despite the substantial amount of research on social media reviews, there is a significant lacuna in predicting the effect of social media reviews on students’ purchasing behaviour especially related digital products. Moreover, many researchers explicitly mentioned that it is the right time to investigate the effect of online reviews on developing mutual trust. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the effect of social media reviews on both trust and students’ digital purchasing behaviour. Moreover, this study also investigates the mediating effect of trust on digital purchasing behaviour. In line with these goals, this study initially reviews several theories, including the Accessibility-Diagnosticity Model, Attribution Theory, Homophily, and Social Identity/Identification Theory. Moreover, this study also conducted an extensive systematic literature review in order to develop a conceptual framework. Based on these reviews, this study identified five important characteristics of social media reviews that significantly affect both trust and students’ purchasing behaviour. These attributes are review valence, relevance, content, credibility and volume. In order to test the hypotheses, this study developed a structured questionnaire by adapting items from several prior studies. This study targeted Libyan students as its respondents and distributed the questionnaire link through social media. Structural equation modelling (SEM) was applied to quantify the effect of all these variables. This study, indeed, is one of the few studies that quantifies the effect of social media review characteristics on trust, and purchasing decisions, especially for digital products. Additionally, this study will expand the current knowledge of the effect of social media effect on consumers’ buying decision.