Advertisements on Facebook: Identifying the persuasive elements in the development of positive attitudes in consumers

Abstract The main objective of this study is to develop the scale items of consumers’ attitudes toward Facebook advertisements and to theorize consumers’ attitudinal behaviour. To undertake this study, a research assistant was appointed, who is also an active member of Facebook, to introduce a message about the product Samsung Tab S, and to pass it to other members of their network. From this experiment, different members of their network participated in generating, passing, and receiving messages to develop a preliminary structured perception which was converted to generate scale items to measure attitude. Then an independent empirical study was conducted among members of a social network to verify and validate these scale items and their underlying constructs. From the findings in this study, it is identified that attitudes toward social network advertisement, i.e., any effort to communicate messages about products among network members, who are also consumers of different products, is formed and persuaded by hedonic motivation (HM), source derogation (SD), self-concept (SC), message informality (MI), and experiential messages (EM).