The rapid development of online social networks has given rise to a plethora of dedicated forums that help facilitate information exchange. Taking on such an ad-vantage, many corporations have stepped up their investment in online marketing. The effectiveness of this marketing strategy, however, has yet to be determined despite wide reception of online community-based advertisements among social network users. This study aims to analyze the factors influencing business willingness to advertise through social networking sites, so as to build an evaluation model. This paper begins by literature review and expert interview in order to identify important factors. Analytic Hierarchy Process is then applied to build the hierarchy model. According to our finding, the four dimensions of this proposed framework contribute equally for the decision making issue. In contrast, the five indicators namely “user preference for social net-works,” “image and popularity,” “cost,” “hits” and “word-or-mouth marketing” are found playing relatively important role in this regard, which contribute to more than 60 percent of model decision in total. This study is believed to providing useful reference framework and guidelines for corporations with regard to selection of appropriate social media for their online marketing effort.
