The Impact Of Micro-blogging Information On Retailer's Performance

With the popularity of social media,traditional retailing companies have adopted social media platforms such as micro-blogging and WeChat as the communication channels for marketing information about corporate brands,products and services.However,there is still a lack of uniform standard to evaluate the marketing impacts on micro-blogging in the academic community.Most of them take the users' attitudes about the enterprise micro-blogging as the research object,but the research on the impact of firm performance is relatively scarce.Taking firm performance as the outcome variable,this paper builds a theoretical model about the impact of micro-blogging information on firm performance,based on marketing information communication theory?self-cognition theory and wet marketing theory to explain the mechanism of different types of micro-blogging information(social micro-blogging information and functional micro-blogging information,original micro-blogging information and non-original micro-blogging information)on firm performance.This paper empirically analyzes 211,467 micro-blogging data from 340 official Sina Weibo accounts of 11 retailing listed companies in 2013~2017.The results show that:(1)Social and functional micro-blogging information have a positive impact on customer engagement,and functional micro-blogging information has a greater role.(2)Original and non-original micro-blogging information have a positive impact on customer engagement,and original micro-blogging information has a greater role.(3)Customer engagement(sharing?commenting and liking)has a positive impact on current firm performance,and has no impact on next period of corporate performance.(4)Functional and original micro-blogging information have a positive impact on current firm performance,while social and non-original micro-blogging information have no impact on current firm performance.And they all have no impact on next period of corporate performance.Finally,this paper discusses the theoretical contributions and practical significance of the research as well as future research directions.