Abstract
Word-of-mouth communication (WOM) is considered as an important issue for marketing researchers. Through the positive WOM to influence other potential customers has been considered as an effective marketing mode. As more and more marketers incorporate social media as an integral part to align engagement strategy in consumers' electronic WOM (e-WOM), the mobile marketing has emerged. The omni-channel tactics lead to the success in gaining traffic and raising awareness to achieve effective and efficient marketing benefits. However, it is not clear how they works and only limited research has been published regarding e-WOM communication in social media context. Accordingly, this study intends to combine related research—including communication theory, uses and gratifications theory, social capital and value theory—to investigate the determinants of consumers' intention to share marketing information on the social media. We use experiment design to test our hypothesis. 32 scenarios: 2 (tie strength: strong vs. weak) × 2 (utilitarian value: high vs. low) × 2 (hedonic value: high vs. low) × 2 (receiver characteristic: active vs. passive) × 2 (transmission channel: mobile vs. desktop) were developed for the experiment. The results suggest that tie strength, contents with utilitarian value and hedonic value, characteristic of the audiences and transmission channel affects the willing to share information significantly. We intend to produce findings that deserve considerable attention from marketers seeking to implement e-WOM campaigns on social media and the implications and limitation are discussed for researchers and practitioners.