Investigating the Effect of Social Dependency on Customer Trust in Social Networks

Considering the increasing usage of smartphones, serving customers has taken a different form. In recent years the number of Iranian users on social media platforms such as Instagram has had a noticeable rapid increase. Therefore, lots of small and medium sized businesses share their products and services with consumers via their pages on social media and sell them online. The aim of the authors was to understand how much Instagram users trust business pages and to what extent these pages impact the purchasing decision of the consumers. In this study, using the regression model, the relationship between gender, the number of pages a customer follows on Instagram, the number of people the customer is following, the number of pages they follow the business page and the number of times a customer checks his Instagram page per day have been evaluated as independent variables. The amount of trust he has in purchasing from a business page was the dependent variable. The data were collected through surveying 136 Instagram users in Iran. The regression model was used to analyze the data. The research results showed that of the set of predicted factors, only the number of times a customer checks his Instagram page has a significant effect on his trust when purchasing from business pages.