Social Network Integration and Online Review Helpfulness: An Empirical Investigation

While the proliferation of online reviews greatly facilitates consumers’ online purchasing decisions, it also introduces the challenge of information overload. Many review websites have adopted voting systems to help consumers identify helpful reviews. This study contributes to the existing research by examining the impact of social network integration (SNI), an emerging social media feature on online review platforms, on the perceived helpfulness of these reviews. Drawing on data collected on a leading Chinese online review platform, our research reveals a positive impact of SNI on online review helpfulness. Additionally, we demonstrate that the impact of SNI on online review helpfulness can be moderated by different reviewer-related factors. Specifically, the effect of SNI is strengthened by higher reviewer expertise and the establishment of more follower ties and weakened by the amount of peer recognition received by the reviewer. To address the endogeneity issues arising from the reviewers’ self-selection process of SNI, we employed several identification strategies and confirmed the robustness of our results. Furthermore, our analyses of the underlying mechanisms reveal that SNI primarily enhances review helpfulness by motivating reviewers to invest greater effort in generating review content.