دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی آیا تلاش های بازاریابی شرکت در بازاریابی رسانه های اجتماعی به دست می آید؟ - الزویر 2018

Abstract

A growing number of travel agencies in the tourism industry use social media to promote their services and reach target customers despite some doubt regarding the effectiveness of these tools. Nevertheless, most prior studies adopt a customer-centric perspective to explore the usefulness of earned social media (e.g., eWOM) and its influences on customer behavior. Few have examined a firm’s owned social media strategy (e.g., a Facebook brand page) in online social interactions. This paper distinguishes owned media from earned media by site ownerships and communication paths. We study a firm’s marketing efforts on its owned media (Facebook brand page) and evaluate the resulting effect on sales. Based on the cognitive fit theory, we further explore whether a firm can moderate such effects by promoting different types of products. Working with a leading travel agency in Taiwan, we collected a matched sample of products with Facebook marketing (treatment group) and those without Facebook marketing (control group). Using a quasi-experimental design and difference-in-difference (DID) estimation, we evaluate the effect of a firm’s efforts on Facebook marketing campaigns after controlling time-fixed selection bias and common time-series heterogeneity. While the method is powerful and intuitive, its validity largely relies on the common trend assumption. A concise discussion on caveats of DID estimation is provided to carefully examine our findings, as well as serve as a simple guidance for IS research. The results show that Facebook campaign activities have a positive impact on purchases of tourism products. Furthermore, sales are more likely to increase when a travel agency promotes tourism products that are highly structured, medium-priced, or medium-length, or that require more tourist involvement. Such effects are further examined across different quantiles of sales and in different time spans to see when product moderations are more prominent. The empirical findings facilitate decision-making of e-commerce managers in the tourism industry not only by justifying the effectiveness as well as budget allocation of owned social media marketing, but also by providing a rudimentary guidance on the product selection in Facebook marketing campaigns.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

As social media are fundamentally changing the way we communicate, collaborate, consume and create, researchers have made various investigations into the relationship among social media, business, and society (Aral et al., 2013). Due to the nature of Web 2.0, which emphasizes the idea of collaboration where customers create content and deliver content to others, most prior studies have mainly adopted a customer-centric perspective to explore the usefulness of eWOM and its influence on customer behavior. Among those studies, a majority is performed under the context of earned social media where customers control content generation via blog post and conversations in third-party online communities. The unbalanced number of research on earned social media may have caused an erroneous notion that a firm can only play a passive role. Our study aims to extend the research stream by exploring a firm’s active role in its owned social media to post marketing campaigns, and by examining the effectiveness of firms’ efforts and the management of product characteristics.