Advertising in social media: a review of empirical evidence

Abstract

This article presents an up-to-date review of academic and empirical research on advertising in social media. Two international databases from business and communication studies were searched, identifying 51 relevant studies. The findings of the identified studies were organized by seven emerging themes: use of advertising in social media, attitudes about and exposure to advertising, targeting, user-generated content in advertising, electronic word-of-mouth in advertising, consumer-generated advertising, and further advertising effects. Besides researched topics and major results, year of publication, journal, theoretical framework, research method, sample, measured constructs, and way of analysis were examined regarding each article. The review concludes by providing an agenda for future research.

Keywords:

• web 2.0
• social media
• social network sites
• advertising
• review
• research agenda

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.