Abstract

This study explores the relationship between social media information diffusion and economic outcomes. Specifically, we examine characteristics of Twitter information diffusion surrounding US box office and their relationship with each movie’s first-weekend gross revenue. We built the social media network structure based on retweets mentioning each movie and extract three metrics of Twitter information diffusion: volume, speed, and reach. A total of 185,029 retweets originated from over six million tweets for seventy-eight movies released between January and September 2014 are downloaded. We find all three measures of information diffusion relevant in explaining gross revenue while only volume and reach are relevant when movie profile followers are used as a control in our OLS robust regression models. This study has two important contributions. First, it provides intuitions to practitioners in improving their social media marketing strategies. Second, it presents new insights to researchers in understanding the different characteristics of information diffusion in relation to performance outcomes.

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