Trust in open versus closed social media: The relative influence of user- and marketer-generated content in social network services on customer trust

Abstract

Recently, “closed” or “private” social network services (SNSs) have emerged and become popular; this popularity is primarily driven by privacy issues and information overload in open SNSs such as Twitter or Facebook. Scholars and practitioners are interested in the relationship between product reviews and customer trust in both closed and open SNSs, but we do not fully understand why, how, or what types of online product reviews in open or closed SNSs influence trust. This paper explores how customer trust in content is influenced by different types of content generators and SNSs. The results of our experiments show that user-generated content (UGC) has a stronger effect on customers’ cognitive trust than does marketer-generated content (MGC) and that the effect of product reviews in closed SNSs on customers’ cognitive and emotional trust is greater than the effect in open SNSs. Finally, we find that the interaction between content generator types and SNS types affects customers’ emotional trust. This paper contributes to the empirical research on SNSs and online product reviews and has practical implications.