Investigating the Effect of Social Media on Trust Building in Customer-Supplier Relationships

Trust is a concept that has been widely studied in e-commerce since it represents a key issue in building successful customer-supplier relationships. In this sense, social software represents a powerful channel for establishing a direct communication with customers. As a consequence, companies are now investing in social media for building their social digital brand and strengthening relationships with their customers. In this paper, we present the preliminary results of an ongoing research aimed at investigating the role of social media in the process of trust building, with particular attention to the case of small-medium enterprises. Our findings show that social media contribute to build more affective trust than traditional websites, suggesting that social media have the potential to enhance the business of SMEs other than large companies, by fostering the affective commitment of customers.