Start Date
11-12-2016 12:00 AM
Description
Recently, it is catching considerable attention that more people are making money through social media. Those most-followed users have started to sell products online rather than purely earning through advertisements. Whether and how social media interactions (tweet, retweet, comment) affect these product sales remain underexplored. Moreover, extent literature mainly focuses on traditional companies rather than currently booming individuals (Internet stars) on social media platforms. We explore this question with uniquely matched datasets from leading tweeting platform (Sina Weibo) and e-commerce market (Taobao). We aim to empirically examine how the product sales on e-market are affected by the advertising effects (i.e., the store owners’ tweets, the influential users’ retweets) and the user engagement efforts (i.e., average users’ retweets and comments). We expect that both effects will lead to increased sales but with different mechanisms and that these effects are diminishing as the owner becoming more and more popular.
Recommended Citation
ZHANG, Zhixing, "Who Boost Your Sales, Somebody or Nobody?" (2016). ICIS 2016 Proceedings. 23.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2016/EBusiness/Presentations/23
Who Boost Your Sales, Somebody or Nobody?
Recently, it is catching considerable attention that more people are making money through social media. Those most-followed users have started to sell products online rather than purely earning through advertisements. Whether and how social media interactions (tweet, retweet, comment) affect these product sales remain underexplored. Moreover, extent literature mainly focuses on traditional companies rather than currently booming individuals (Internet stars) on social media platforms. We explore this question with uniquely matched datasets from leading tweeting platform (Sina Weibo) and e-commerce market (Taobao). We aim to empirically examine how the product sales on e-market are affected by the advertising effects (i.e., the store owners’ tweets, the influential users’ retweets) and the user engagement efforts (i.e., average users’ retweets and comments). We expect that both effects will lead to increased sales but with different mechanisms and that these effects are diminishing as the owner becoming more and more popular.