Likes or Views? Making Recommendations More Effective through Social Features from Construal Level Perspective

Social recommendation, as an important part of social e-commerce, plays a key role in affecting consumer judgment and the decision process. Considering the traits in using social media on the mobile device, we focus on how to design and display persuasive messages to promote buying using existing social feedback. This research first investigates how different social feedback type (i.e., likes versus views) affects consumer information processing. Drawing from construal-level theory, two experiments are designed to test the hypothesis that likes versus views are cognitively associated with low-level versus high-level construal, respectively. Furthermore, we combine the feedback type with social distance and propose that the presence of likes from friends can induce higher purchase intentions than showing likes from crowds, whereas the opposite occurs for displaying the views. This study will provide important implications for research and practice in designing effective recommender systems on mobile social commerce.