Abstract
Chinese social media platforms such as WeChat, TikTok (Douyin in Chinese), and Weibo have become increasingly popular, attracting large amounts of loyal users in and outside of China. Borrowing theories on brand trust and perceived brand values from Marketing and Management, this study examines how perceived media values influence trust in Chinese social media brands such as Weibo and WeChat. Utilizing original survey data collected from Chinese social media users, our study finds that: (1) Chinese users perceive five layers of values in using social media applications, including information value, entertainment value, social networking value, social status value, and organizational communication value; (2) these perceived media values have different effects on trust in social media brands: while entertainment value, social networking value, and social status value directly affect social media brand trust, information value and organizational communication value indirectly affect social media brand trust through social status value, social networking value and/or entertainment value. Our study suggests an important explanation for trust in social media and develops a scale of perceived media values (PMV) that can be used by future researchers.
1. Introduction
The emergence of the Web 2.0 technology has changed the dynamics of the media system. In China, various social media platforms such as WeChat, TikTok and Weibo have become increasingly popular, attracting large amounts of users at home and abroad in recent years. For instance, WeChat alone had 1.24 billion monthly active users as of the first quarter of 2020 (Iqbal, 2021), and TikTok attracted 100 million monthly active users in the US alone as of August 2020 (Sherman, 2020). The TikTok user base has become so large that the Trump administration even saw it as a threat to national security and issued an executive order to ban the application along with WeChat in the US. It is intriguing how social media sites such as WeChat and TikTok have attracted such a large loyal user base within China and around the world. Is there anything unique about these social media platforms that make their users trust these brands?
5. Discussion
5.1. Implications of results
While more and more people use social media daily and spend tremendous amount of time on social media, a survey of more than 80,000 people in 40 countries before the COVID-19 pandemic revealed low levels of trust in digital news and rising concern about misinformation online, despite the efforts made by journalists, editors, politicians, and public health officials to convey truthful messages to the general public (Newman, Fletcher, Schulz, Andi, & Neilsen, 2020). Against this backdrop, our study aims to answer an important question: What influences trust in social media brands? We borrow literature from both marketing and media to examine how various uses of social media (i.e., perceived media values) influence trust in social media brands.
