SOCIAL MEDIA ENGAGEMENT, INCOME, AND ONLINE PURCHASING BEHAVIOR: A CHI-SQUARE ANALYSIS OF ROMANIAN CONSUMERS

Dragoș Bujor; Ștefan-Ionuț Anghel; Antonia-Gabriela Maloș; Cosmin Caracas; Anastasia-Cristina DUMITRU

doi:10.5281/zenodo.21221242

Abstract

Social media has become a central force in contemporary marketing, reshaping how consumers discover, evaluate, and purchase products. Yet as marketing budgets shift toward digital channels, the factors that actually convert exposure into expenditure remain insufficiently understood, particularly in emerging digital economies such as Romania, where the relative weight of engagement intensity versus economic capacity has received little direct empirical attention. Drawing on the stimulus–organism–response framework and integrating technologyacceptance, social-influence, and uses-and-gratifications perspectives, this study examines how social media engagement and income relate to online purchasing among Romanian consumers. Survey data from 130 respondents with prior online-shopping experience, collected in early 2025, are analyzed through cross-tabulations and chi-square tests of independence, with Cramér’s V as the effect-size measure. Income is significantly associated with both time spent on social media (Cramér’s V = 0.31) and monthly online expenditure (Cramér’s V = 0.36), whereas time spent on social media is not significantly associated with expenditure (Cramér’s V = 0.23). Economic capacity therefore emerges as a stronger correlate of online expenditure than engagement intensity. Respondents also reported substantially stronger purchase influence from micro-influencers and promoted content than from organic brand posts. The findings indicate that income-based segmentation, combined with authentic, peer-based content, outperforms strategies that merely maximize screen-time exposure, and they extend the empirical evidence on digital consumer behavior to an under-researched emerging market.

Keywords

social media; e-commerce; social commerce; consumer behavior; influencer marketing; electronic word-ofmouth; Romania.

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