The effect of social media advertising on attitude toward brand: An apllication on Facebook

Social media, which provide users of virtual communities with the ability to create and share their own content, represents the media for consumers to make researches on brands and businesses and access expected products quickly and easily. Some of the main focus points of marketing are to provide recognition for products and create visibility and awareness. In today's condition, social media is the best tool to accomplish these objectives. Advertisements, which users will see by coincidence when they use social media with various purposes, have been developed and designed for this purpose. In this study, due to the increasing importance of the social media, the effect of social media advertising on attitude toward brand was examined. The study is designed as four chapters. In the first chapter Web 2.0 and new trends are mentioned. In the second chapter social media marketing are mentioned, the concept of advertising is given, attitude and social media advertising are emphasized. In the third chapter brand, attitude toward brand and empathy of concept are described. As the most widely used social media tool is Facebook, this study was applied to Facebook users. 312 questionnaires were obtained. Within the evaluation of survey results, factor analysis, linear regressions analysis, t test for demographic hypothesis and the Anova test were applied. The regression analysis results release that there is a significant relationship among the attitude towards brands, formativeness of social media ads, visual design of the ads, the perceived herd behavior and the awareness of immediate environment as well as the attitude for explaining the empathy towards social media advertisement. There is also a significant relationship between attitude toward explaining the empathy and the attitude toward brand. It was examined if the attitude towards the brand varies according to demographic features and it was found that there is no significant difference.