Date of Award

2014

Degree Type

Thesis

Department

Communication

First Advisor

Bracken, Cheryl Campanella

Subject Headings

Facebook (Electronic resource), Social media, Internet advertising, Social media -- Economic aspects, Internet marketing, social media, advertising, facebook ads, limited capacity model

Abstract

This study applied the Limited Capacity Model (Lang, 2000) to understand how individuals' process their Facebook pages. It is an eye tracking study that collected data from students at a Midwestern university to analyze how individuals process, encode, store and retrieve posts from their Facebook pages, specifically suggested/sponsored posts that are integrated into their newsfeed and targeted to them based on known information. The individuals explored their Facebook pages and were asked to recall the brands or advertisements they were first exposed to on their page. The results from eye tracking were used to analyze how they oriented to and whether they attended to the targeted message. The data collected from this study lays a foundation for how these types of messages are processed for future marketing initiatives and which factors to consider when strategically targeting an audience via a Facebook suggested/ sponsored post. This study found that individuals who liked the brand in their Facebook suggested/sponsored post were able to recall and recognize the brand more than individuals who disliked the brand in their Facebook suggested/sponsored post

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