SHOPPING ON SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES: A Study on Facebook Consumers’ Psychological Characteristics

Abstract

Nowadays, social media like Facebook and Twitter, showed increasing number rapidly from time to time. In Indonesia, Facebook has become the largest social media, being the fourth place in user number in 2012, comparing to other countries. As a result, the development of social media provides a developing prospect for E-­marketers and digital entrepreneurs. If E-­marketers know the insights on their buyers’ characteristic, they could get insights on how customers interpret and receive stimuli (messages/information), which could affect customers’ decisions. This paper focuses on interpreting factors which affect young people’s online shopping in Facebook, as well as finding consumers online characteristic factors which include cultural, social, personal and psychological factors. In this research, 15 consumers from various online shop in Facebook were interviewed and observed as informants. Those informants are in Y generation category (age 20-­30) who had experienced shops online, male and female, to see if there any differences between gender in their psychological characteristics. From interviews and observations, male and female have different perceptions; female’s reasons to buy are more because of convenience, while male’s reasons are mainly because of product uniqueness and customer service factor, such as reliability and security.

Keywords

• social media
• facebook
• online shopping
• consumer behavior