Chapter 3: Electronic Word-of-Mouth and Social Media

The rise of Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and other social media sites for user-generated content has altered the way people access information, seek product reviews, and make purchase decisions. Electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) is an important form of messaging strategy that is persuasive in influencing consumers' decision-making. Currently, researchers define eWOM as user-generated content consisting of customers' experience and evaluation of a product or service that is communicated through the Internet (Hennig-Thurau et al., 2004; Rathore, 2015). It is important to study eWOM on social media, given its impact on people's daily lives. Social media users share their experience relating to restaurants, technological products, movies, vehicles, healthcare providers, financial products and services, vacations, cell phone service providers, etc. (Allsop et al., 2007). The eWOM communication may be trustworthy and elicit greater impact than other media forms, such as advertisements, because they are created by users typically without commercial interests (Bi, 2018).