New Challenges in Social Media Marketing: Exploring the Interaction Effects of Age and Message Format on Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Outcomes

Abstract

The prevalence of social media and their increasingly diverse user demographics have started to pose new challenges to marketing communication researchers and professionals. Guided by the media richness theory (MRT), this study investigates the main effects of age and three message formats (i.e., text, image, and video) on social media and their interaction effects on attention capturing, positive emotions, product liking, information seeking, and buying intent. The results of an online experiment (N = 240) showed there was a significant main effect of age on different positive emotions (i.e., excited, controlling, and influential), and a significant main effect of format on one positive emotion (i.e., hopeful). There was also a significant interaction effect of age and message format influencing the effectiveness of a social media message for participants’ attention capturing, positive emotions, product liking, information seeking, and buying intent. I discussed possible reasons behind these results and suggestions for future research.