User Disposition and Attitude towards Advertisements Placed in Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube: A Decision Tree and MANOVA Approach

An analytical understanding of user response to advertisements published in social media websites is very interesting from both academic and marketing perspectives. Present research administers two studies; study 1; explores user perceptions of advertisements in four areas of social media, viz. social networking (Facebook), business networking (LinkedIn), microblogging (Twitter) and video sharing (YouTube) dependent to their demographic and lifestyle characteristics, study 2; empirically identifies is there any significant mean difference with the perceived advertising value and attitude across the four social media websites. The data culled from 710 usable responses were used to empirically examine the objectives of this research. The decision tree technique (classification tree) using CHAID criterion and MANOVA was employed to study 1 and study 2 respectively. The results identified that; the four sites showed differing patterns of user attitude towards advertisements published in them (b) both advertising value and attitude compositely differ across the four social media websites.