Explaining the gift-giving intentions of live-streaming audiences through social presence: the perspective of interactive marketing

Purpose Live streaming has become an extremely popular form of online service and allows live audiences to give virtual gifts or money to their favorite streamers. This study aims to investigate the impact of the audience's multidimensional social presence on their attitudes toward live streamers and intentions to give money or gifts to streamers, based on the interactive marketing perspective. This study considers live audiences' gift-giving intentions by integrating the theory of multidimensional social presence, which includes awareness, cognitive social presence and affective social interaction, and the theory of reasoned action (TRA). Design/methodology/approach This study invited audiences who had watched live streaming from several popular live-streaming platforms to respond to a web questionnaire. The unit of analysis was at the individual level. This study applied the purposive sampling technique for data collection. A sample of 258 eligible responses to the online survey was analyzed using SPSS software and the causal relationships between the measurement variables of this research model were verified through structural equation modeling. Findings The results indicate that the audiences' awareness of participating in live streaming enhanced their cognitive and affective social presence, which positively affected their attitudes toward live streamers. These attitudes had a further significant effect on their gift-giving intentions. Cognitive social presence and affective social presence were found to play significant mediating roles in the relationship between awareness and attitudes toward live streamers. Originality/value This study examines audiences' intention to give gifts to their favorite live streamers, based on the interactive marketing perspective. The interactive relationship between live streamers and online audiences is developed by audience members through the process of inner psychological transformation, which is measured through the multidimensional construct of social presence. This occurs through a mutual influence relationship in which awareness simultaneously influences cognitive social presence and affective social presence, and cognitive social presence impacts affective social presence. Research limitations/implications The study contributes three noteworthy findings to the theory development through the integrated perspective of the TRA and the theory of social presence. (1) Exploring the influence of belief factors on internal psychological responses and intention in live streaming to expand an innovative application of the TRA. (2) Adopting the multidimensional social presence can help researchers more clearly describe various live-streaming situations and extend the research scope of the social presence theory to live-streaming interactive marketing strategies. (3) From the perspective of live-streamer marketing, this study broadens the research fields of electronic commerce and interactive marketing. Practical implications This study provides four practical implications for platform managers and live streamers. (1) To induce favorable attitudes toward live streamers, live streamers initiate various interactive activities sequentially to establish a social presence with the audience. (2) Live streamers should devote themselves to forming a joyful atmosphere for their followers, as this will trigger audiences' affective social presence to generate positive attitudes and increase followers' intentions. (3) To attract and retain young followers, live streamers must devise interesting content and provide fresh services. (4) Platform managers must create useful widgets to assist live streamers in managing their channels and followers. Social implications Building friendly real-time interaction between the live streamer and the audience is an important task in live streaming and further influences the income of the live streamer and the platform. The study provides an effective approach to building friendly real-time interaction for the live streamer and manager of live-streaming electronic commerce through the interactive marketing perspective. The approach can help the live streamer manage nice communication with their audience and obtain virtual money and gift-giving from the audience.