Determinants of Click-Through Intention as Affiliate Marketing and the Moderating Effect of Tie Strength in SNS

Affiliate marketing is classified as a type of online advertising, where merchants share a percentage of sales revenue generated by each customer, who visited the company’s website via a content provider. Content provider, referred to as an affiliate, usually places an online advertisement at its website. For the past few years, there have been a lot of companies or individuals who participate in affiliate marketing. Generally speaking, most of them have websites and post the merchant’s ads on their own websites. However, building and maintaining websites have some technology requirements. The widespread use of Social Network Service (SNS), especially microblog-based SNS such as Twitter and Sina Weibo, provides opportunities for individuals who want to be content providers of affiliate marketing. Since information spreads quickly on microblog-based SNS and the easy in targeting customers, it is both an effective and an efficient tool to do affiliate marketing. The relationship between a content provider and the potential customer, which is referred as “tie strength”, is quite an important issue in such situation. This paper proved that service characteristics of the microblog-based SNS (security, community drivenness and navigability) and content quality all had positive influence on click-through intention, while tie strength played a moderating role. For the group with strong tie, tie strength is crucial in influencing click-through intention. While for the weak tie group, content quality was very important. Finally, we proposed some implications for both academics and practitioners.