دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی در سطح بازاریابی بهینه فروشندگان C2C در رسانه های اجتماعی: شواهد از چین - الزویر 2018

Abstract

Social media has become a widely used marketing tool for reaching potential customers. Because of its low cost, social media marketing is especially appealing to customer-to-customer (C2C) sellers. Customers can also benefit from social media marketing by learning about products and by interacting with sellers in real time. However, a seller’s marketing microblogs may backfire on her for dominating the social space. Defining the marketing popularity as the average number of likes each seller receives per marketing-related microblog and defining the marketing aggressiveness level as the proportion of her marketing-related microblogs, this paper empirically quantifies the optimal level of marketing aggressiveness in social media to achieve the maximum popularity. We gather the data from China’s largest microblogging platform, Sina Weibo, and the sellers in our sample are from China’s largest C2C online shopping platform, Taobao. We find that the empirical relationship between the marketing aggressiveness level and the marketing popularity follows an inverted U-shape curve, where the optimal level is around 30%. In addition, we find a saturation effect of the number of followers on marketing popularity after it reaches around 100,000. Our findings imply that social media market-ing should not overlook customers’ social needs. Our measure of marketing aggressiveness provides a dynamic business metric for practitioners to monitor so as to improve their marketing and managerial decision making process.

5 Conclusion

In this paper, we empirically investigate the relationship between sellers’ marketing aggressiveness level and their marketing popularity in social media. In particular, by analysing the microblogs of Taobao sellers on Sina Weibo, we find that the relationship between the proportion of marketing-related microblogs (our measure of marketing aggressiveness) and the average number of likes a seller receives per marketing microblog (our measure of marketing popularity) follows an inverted U-shaped curve. The corresponding optimal proportion of marketing microblogs is around 0.3.

Our paper contributes to the literature of social media marketing by highlighting the tension between customers’ social and commercial needs in the C2C context. Our findings suggest a good practice of social media marketing to strike a balance between the two. That is, a seller may get penalised with less popularity for being too aggressive and hence crowding out customers’ social content in the limited social media space. Our paper also contributes to the recent literature of social media metrics (Peters et al. 2013) and our measure of marketing aggressiveness forms an informative metric for management and marketing practitioners to monitor in real time and to improve their decision making process. The marketing input can be adjusted accordingly when the aggressiveness level becomes too high or too low. Creative marketing microblogs can also be composed to meet customers’ social needs as well as to serve the commercial purpose at the same time.