Tweeting as a Marketing Tool: A Field Experiment in the TV Industry
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0c43ccabbc71b279f98115faf27e18330807.pdf
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2.11 MB
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Author(s)
Gong, Shiyang
Zhang, Juanjuan
Zhao, Ping
Jiang, Xuping
Date Issued
December 2017
Journal
Journal of Marketing Research
Publisher
SAGE Publications
Citation
Gong, Shiyang, Juanjuan Zhang, Ping Zhao, and Xuping Jiang. “Tweeting as a Marketing Tool: A Field Experiment in the TV Industry.” Journal of Marketing Research 54, no. 6 (December 2017): 833–850.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
© 2017, American Marketing Association. Many businesses today have adopted tweeting as a new form of product marketing. However, whether and how tweeting affects product demand remains inconclusive. The authors explore this question using a randomized field experiment on Sina Weibo, the top tweeting website in China. The authors collaborate with a major global media company and examine how the viewing of its TV shows is affected by (1) the media company's tweets about its shows, and (2) recruited Weibo influentials' retweets of the company tweets. The authors find that both company tweets and influential retweets increase show viewing, but in different ways. Company tweets directly boost viewing, whereas influential retweets increase viewing if the show tweet is informative. Meanwhile, influential retweets are more effective than company tweets in bringing new Weibo followers to the company, which indirectly increases viewing. The authors discuss recommendations on how to manage tweeting as a marketing tool.
MIT Department
Sloan School of Management
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Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1509/JMR.14.0348
