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Introduction :

 In this article, we look at a study conducted in Thailand on how to develop a measurement tool to evaluate consumer comments made on a social media community site in order to test how they affect consumer buying decisions. The comments on the Facebook page of Samsung Mobile Thailand fan were rated and recorded on a daily basis for 5 months. A model was developed and tested using confirmatory factor analysis to determine how feedback affects purchasing decisions. The study found that the most influential comments focused on the following: user experience issues, Information requests, business practice issues and comments about product launches and developments. These four variables can be indicator variables for consumer buying decisions in social media marketing. Marketers can apply these four key indicator variables to evaluate social media marketing.

Purchasing decision model :

The internet and social media have completely changed the ways companies communicate with consumers, to the point that they have become key drivers of new marketing and public relations rules. More than 5 billion people now have access to the internet globally and go online to learn about new products and trends, turning to online communities, blogs and social networking sites to search for product reviews and share them with fellow consumers. The research model was developed using the online comment categorization introduced by the best researchers, which identified four core comment category groups in on-line forums :

• Business practice issues : 

Consumer attention to conventional media has been declining and moving drastically towards online channels. However, Online social networks play an important role in social media marketing and provide many opportunities for companies, such as allowing them to observe and get close to their consumers, to collect information, and to participate in discussions through their online brand communities. Since it costs so little for consumers to participate in online social networks, companies can have easy and instant access to consumers, and they have the ability to communicate with them as often as desired. Consumers can also give the companies feedback about their business practices through comments about the quality of customer services and sales representatives. Companies have the ability to provide quick response and can implement fast improvements in their business practices.8 Sharing opinions about businesspracticesonsocialnetworksmotivatesconsumerstoparticipatein the development of a company’s business activities. When consumers feel they are part of the company, they are more likely to continue to use and buy its products. 

• Usage experience issues : 

Consumers can exchange ideas and opinions about products and services via social media. Consumers can now use online social networks to  consider a variety of product and service information sources, such as consumer reviews and comments about their experiences, before they make purchasing decisions. This allows them more power and control in the consumption experience. For example, a consumer who would like to purchase a smartphone but does not know which model to buy goes to an online community to get product reviews and usage experiences from other consumers. This information search process allows the consumer to gradually refine his requirements to determine which model of a particular brand he will ultimately buy.

• Information requests :

Online communities in social networks may serve as information sources for consumers to make purchasing decisions. Consumers may post questions in online forums for specific products, such as asking how easy a new product version is to use or to request specific details about the products they intend to buy. Companies can use social networks as a channel to communicate with their customers by sharing the requested information. The interactions that occur in such channels have positive effects on purchasing decisions.

• Comments about product launches :

Many companies use online social networks as a communication tool to entice their customers to follow their pages for product updates. When they launch new products, they use the product’s official social network page to make announcements and to advertise both marketing activities and special offer events. Interactions between consumers and the company about the product launch raise consumer awareness of the product and later have the potential to positively influence purchasing decisions.

Result:

In this study, Researchers collected comments from the official Samsung Mobile Thailand Facebook fan page over a period of 4 months (December 2011–March 2012). they collected comments that remained posted for at least week as this gave people enough time to see, discuss and give feedback on a topic. Comments were collected on a daily basis and responses to the prime comments were also collected. And they came to result that online feedback was the primary factor behind 20-50 percent of all purchasing decisions.

conclusion :

The primary goal of social marketing is to influence consumers to buy products and thus we can conclude that comments in online discussion forums could be categorized into four key groups that can be used as the indicator variables of consumer purchasing decisions in social media marketing on social network platforms.

So we can say the essential study objective was to prove that product-related discussions on social network websites can be used as a proxy to evaluate the effectiveness of social media marketing.