Reputational Assets and Social Media Marketing Activeness: Empirical Insights from China

Anders Johansson and Zhen Zhu ()
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Zhen Zhu: Kent Business School, University of Kent, Postal: Parkwood Road, Canterbury, Kent CT2 7FS, United Kingdom

No 2021-53, Stockholm School of Economics Asia Working Paper Series from Stockholm School of Economics, Stockholm China Economic Research Institute

Abstract: We explore the linkages between social media marketing activeness and reputational assets on digital platforms with a unique sample of over 8,000 customer-to-customer (C2C) sellers registered on both Taobao, China’s largest C2C online shopping platform, and Sina Weibo, China’s largest microblogging platform. A unique collaborative effort between the two platforms enables us to examine whether C2C sellers are motivated to engage in marketing activities on a separate social media platform. Applying machine learning and natural language processing methods, we first identify whether C2C sellers conduct social media marketing on their microblogs. We then differentiate between earned and owned reputation factors accumulated on both platforms and test their relationships to social media marketing activeness. We find that earned reputation factors on both platforms are significantly associated with social media marketing activeness. However, we identify a conflict of owned reputation factors between the two platforms, which provides a potential explanation for the limited success of the cross-platform collaboration.

Keywords: social media marketing; reputational assets; electronic commerce; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L81 M15 M30 M31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36 pages
Date: 2021-10-15
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big, nep-cmp, nep-cna and nep-pay
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