Advertising to Early Trend Propagators: Evidence from Twitter
Name
SSRN-id2419743.pdf
Description
Submitted version
Size
3.71 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
50722ddb4c2edb0b17ec47164391e92d
Author(s)
Lambrecht, Anja
Tucker, Catherine Elizabeth
Wiertz, Caroline
Date Issued
January 2018
Journal
Marketing Science
Publisher
Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS)
Citation
Lambrecht, Anja et al. "Advertising to Early Trend Propagators: Evidence from Twitter." Marketing Science 37, 2 (March 2018): 177-199 © 2018 INFORMS
Version
Original manuscript
Abstract
In the digital economy, influencing and controlling the spread of information is a key concern for firms. One way firms try to achieve this is to target firm communications to consumers who embrace and propagate the spread of new information on emerging and “trending” topics on social media. However, little is known about whether early trend propagators are indeed responsive to firm-sponsored messages. To explore whether early propagators of trending topics respond to advertising messages, we use data from two field tests conducted by a charity and an emerging fashion firm on the microblogging service Twitter. On Twitter, “promoted tweets” allow advertisers to target individuals based on the content of their recent postings. Twitter continuously identifies in real time which topics are newly popular among Twitter users. In the field tests, we collaborated with a charity and a fashion firm to target ads at consumers who embraced a Twitter trend early in its life cycle by posting about it, and compared their behavior to that of consumers who posted about the same topic later on. Throughout both field tests, we consistently find that early propagators of trends are less responsive to advertising than consumers who embrace trends later. Keywords: online advertising; targeting; Twitter; user-generated content; Internet
MIT Department
Sloan School of Management
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1287/mksc.2017.1062
