An Empirical Study on the Effects of Social Networking on Consumer Buying Behaviour in Bhusawal

Abstract

The emergence of social networking sites (SNS) such as Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and YouTube has changed the ways in which consumers search for information, consider options and make purchases. This is particularly true in semi-urban and Tier 3 towns in India, where the rapid growth of smartphones and cheap data packages have given more people access to the internet. The study aims at experimentally testing the impact of social networking usage on the consumer’s purchasing decision in Bhusawal, a tier-3 town in Jalgaon district of Maharashtra. Sample size was estimated at 140 respondents using convenience and snowball sampling. A structured questionnaire was circulated. The data were analyzed in IBM SPSS and one-way ANOVA, independent samples t-test and descriptive statistics. Two theories were formulated and tested. The findings show that social networking has a statistically significant positive influence on consumer buying behaviour (p < 0.05) and age differences are statistically insignificant. The present study contributes to the knowledge about digital consumer behavior in Tier-3 Indian marketplaces and has implications for digital marketing practitioners, small sellers and marketers working in similar socio-economic settings.

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