Exploring the Benefits of Social Media Marketing for Brands and Communities
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7903/ijecs.1547Keywords:
Social Media, Social Media Marketing, BrandAbstract
In recent years, social media becomes a new communication channel in marketing. Social media facilitate improved targeting and play a critical role in marketing operations. We collect empirical data that can be used to determine whether social media marketing actually creates brand benefits or increases product sales. We proposed a new model for measuring the effectiveness of social media marketing and explained the benefits created by different brand and user types on social media. By conducting the seemingly unrelated regression estimation (SURE) model, this research collected 1,956 valid samples from the consumers who use the social media marketing. The results show that search goods and experience goods in social media marketing create diverse effective directions in interaction effects. For mobile phone brands other than the iPhone, social benefits were nonsignificant; however, brand benefits for them were significant because of the interplay of benefits.Although scholars and marketers are aware already of the significance of social media marketing, there are no definitive empirical data that can be used to determine whether social media marketing actually creates brand benefits or increases product sales. Moreover, in the past, most scholars have focused on verifying causality among the joining motivation, participation, and benefits for a single social media channel (Algesheimer, Dholakia, and Hermann, 2005; Van Doorn et al., 2010). Discussions about brand and the relationship between user types and benefits in social media marketing research are rare. Therefore, in this study, the benefits of social media marketing were examined by considering seven types of social media users and two types of brands in an attempt to identify the main success factors affecting social media marketing.
To cite this document: I-Ping Chiang, Ray Wong, and Chih-hui Huang, "Exploring the Benefits of Social Media Marketing for Brands and Communities", International Journal of Electronic Commerce Studies, Vol.10, No.2, pp.113-140, 2019.
Permanent link to this document:
http://dx.doi.org/10.7903/ijecs.1547