Brand content diffusion on Social Networking Sites: Exploring the triadic relationship between the brand, the individual, and the community

This dissertation explores the antecedents and consequences of brand content diffusion on Social Networking Sites (SNSs), by investigating what influences SNS users to pass along messages created by brands via retweeting on Twitter, and sharing on Facebook.
The dissertation is organized in four chapters. The first three chapters explore the antecedents of this process, namely how (1) message, (2) network and (3) personality characteristics influence SNS users to retweet or share brand messages. The concluding chapter (4) investigates the consequences of this behavior, particularly how it influences attitudes towards the brand, and towards the message. The Dissertation Overview summarizes the theoretical and practical implications from the overall findings of this dissertation.
Key findings: The emergence of SNSs brings forward new mechanisms of information diffusion such as retweeting and sharing that have opened up a wide range of opportunities for brand communication. We argue that these capabilities have not only helped to accelerate eWOM, but also have enabled consumers to become gatekeepers of their own personal audiences on SNSs, by actively selecting and passing along brand messages to their friends or contacts on the SNS. The studies presented in this dissertation set out to investigate the antecedents and consequences of this behavior, exploring both the brand and the user perspective.