Would you change your mind? An empirical study of social impact theory on Facebook

The purpose of this research is to investigate how attitude change happens on social media and explore the factors key to persuasion. We apply social impact theory to investigate the effects of persuader immediacy or relationship closeness, message persuasiveness, and perceived supportiveness on attitude change on Facebook. Using 2016 Taiwan President election as the backdrop, 313 Taiwan President election voters were invited to participate in the survey. Results show that persuader immediacy is not significantly related to attitude change or attitude maintenance, while message persuasiveness and supportiveness are significantly related to both attitude change and maintenance, which in turn, predict one’s intentions to vote for the opposite political camp.