Exploring factors-of user's peer-influence behavior in social media on purchase intention: Evidence from QQ

How to leverage the interactions and peer-influences among online friends to motivate users' purchase willingness and improve marketing performance has been a hot research issue in human behavior based on social media. In our research, we extracted the dataset of users' purchasing membership services on QQ, the biggest online instant message system in China, to explore the main factors of user's peer influence behavior on promoting purchase in social media. Through a series of-elaborate experiments, we obtained some valuable results. First, though the high-degree users who have a lot of online friends will influence more followers to purchase the services, the proportion of friends involved in the purchase is actually comparatively lower than some low-degree users. At the same time, the "neighbor-press effect" induced from a user's connected friends having purchased will bring obvious positive impact on promoting this user's purchase willingness. Finally, the length of most purchase chains (about 80%) is within two nodes, which verifies that the purchase diffusion-is more confined in the small-scale "circle of friends". Our results indicate that peer-influence purchase is less likely to be due to the influence of higher degree users but is more related to the number of prior adoptions (predecessors) in the user's social neighborhood. The achievements of this study will provide deep technical supports for strategic planning and implementation in the social marketing practice. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.