Purpose and Rational: Social media is an emerging platform for many retail communication channels accommodating various consumers’ needs and wants. There are many research exploring impact of social media on business practice and behavioral outcomes, however, there is only few research focusing on which factors affect the psychological and social variables on actual usage of social media for shopping. This study focuses on the role of consumer perception on flow of social media usage and the moderating effect of consumer’s social variables (i.e. social identity, group norm and social influence) on actual usage of social media information for shopping. The purposes of this study are as follow: 1) To examine empirical effects of flow of social media usage on perceived ease of use social media for shopping, perceived usefulness of social media information and actual usage of social media information for shopping. 2) To explore the perceived ease of use social media information for shopping and perceived usefulness of social media information affect actual usage of social media for shopping. 3) To investigate moderating effect of social variables between the links. Methodology: This research utilized an online self-administered survey to collect data. Two thousand e-mail invitations were distributed to a randomly selected sample from national panel and in order to address the hypotheses stated a dataset of 342 social media users was compiled. The instrument was designed to obtain comprehensive quantitative data and was an adaptation of questionnaire instruments validated in previous studies. For statistical analysis, the structural equation model was used. The results indicated that flow of social media usage influences on perceived ease of use social media information for shopping, perceived usefulness of social media information and actual usage of social media for shopping. Also consumers’ perceived ease of use on social media for shopping and perceived usefulness of social media information effect on actual usage of social media for shopping. Lastly, the social identity and social influence played as moderator variables between the links at actual usage of social media for shopping in all passages except group norm. The results empirically contribute to verify through quantitative research methods in relation to the role of flow of social media usage and the moderating effect of consumer’s social variables (i.e. social identity and social influence) on actual usage of social media for shopping.

• Jungkun Park(University of Houston)
• Eunjung Lee(Kookmin University)
• Younghee Lee(Konkuk University)
• Seungsin Lee(Konkuk University)