Facing up to Facebook et al. : An Investigation into the Emergence of Social Media as a Tool for Both Consumers and Business

The overall objective of this dissertation is to examine whether or not consumers are influenced by negative posts on social media sites. This dissertation will also investigate what consumers expect from companies on social media sites, how companies themselves operate on social media sites and the unethical behaviour of these companies on social media sites. The author used a mixed method approach when investigating the objectives. A quantitative method was used to examine the main objective while qualitative methods were used when investigating the other three objectives. A total of 112 surveys were collected for research. The results of the research were analysed in order to ascertain the influence that negative posts exert and linked back to the literature. Consumers have changed in the way they expect things to occur online and companies need to adapt in order to benefit from having a social media presence and to increase their revenue