社会化媒体营销

随着社交网络用户数量的日益增多，基于社交网络的社会化媒体的出现被看作是互联网的技术进步，它是消费者生成内容与分享信息的主要载体，是口碑信息快速被传播的在线平台，依托于社会化媒体平台进行的口碑营销的传播方式得到了学界与业界的共同关注。本文通过深度访谈和问卷调查对用户进行调研，收集数据并进行分析，探索影响社会化媒体口碑营销的因素，建立模型，提出研究假设并逐一对假设验证，探讨社会化媒体口碑营销各因素对消费者购买意愿存在的影响，最终得出研究结论。最后，本文根据研究结论为相关企业提出了改进建议与营销策略。

随着信息技术的迅猛发展，社交媒体已成为现代社会中不可或缺的信息传播载体，尤其对时尚产业产生了深远影响。各大时尚品牌通过社会化媒体平台进行营销，提升知名度和市场竞争力。然而，社会化媒体营销在带来便利和创新的同时，也引发了一系列社会问题，尤其是对女性消费者外表焦虑的加剧。本文从社会心理学视角出发，探讨时尚产业社会化媒体营销对女性外表焦虑的影响机制，分析社会比较理论、自我客体化理论、从众心理和社会认同理论在这一过程中的作用。结合上述因素，针对时尚品牌、社交媒体平台和女性消费者三方面提出改善建议。

随着互联网技术的快速发展，社会化媒体平台逐渐成为消费者购物的重要渠道。本文以SICAS模型为基础，研究了社会化媒体环境中消费者信息偶遇对其消费行为的影响。研究分析了消费者信息偶遇对消费者沟通交流、消费者购买行为的影响，以消费者对商品信息的感知为中介变量。研究发现商品信息偶遇正向影响消费者对商品信息或服务的感知，同时消费者对商品信息的感知也对其针对该商品信息交流、购买行为起到正向显著影响。最后，为相关企业在社会化媒体平台信息发布提供了相应的策略建议。

社交媒体的发展促使电商平台走上探索社交化的道路，催生出一种新的商业模式，即社交电商。本研究通过案例分析，从发展概况、用户画像、平台特点、市场定位及经营策略五个方面对比分析了抖音、快手、小红书的营销策略，发现三个社交电商平台在用户群体、平台定位、经营策略等方面各有差异。并建议新型社交电商平台要构建精准的用户画像，明晰平台的核心价值定位，并形成特色经营策略。

互联网的发展使网购成为购物的主流渠道，社会化媒体为消费者获取真实信息、实现信息互动提供重要平台，同时社会化媒体通过消费者的真实口碑符号分享进一步带动了网购；消费者利用社会化媒体进行社会化分享带动了消费行为，在虚拟社区中形成新的社会网络。本文基于社会网络理论，结合小红书“社区”用户之间关注与被关注信息传播的网络拓扑关系，通过结构洞、弱关系分析关键意见消费者的作用，探讨社会网络用户之间的知识分享传递方式对消费者购物行为的影响。

在当今互联网技术越来越发达的阶段，越来越多的企业在营销策略中纳入了社交媒体营销这一形式，但大部分企业未能获得预期的营销效果。本文针对蜜雪冰城当下社交媒体营销情况，基于SICAS模型设计题项并发放问卷收集相关数据，首先借助预调研的形式判断问卷题项设计的合理性，其次正式调研借助SPSS软件通过信效度分析、回归分析等发现蜜雪冰城在社交媒体营销策略方面存在着消费者感知度不足、兴趣欠缺、沟通效果不佳、购买欲望弱、分享积极性不佳等现象，并针对性地提出相关的改进建议，以期能助力蜜雪冰城实现更加高效的营销效果，也希望能够为新式茶饮行业的社交媒体营销策略改进方面提供借鉴，并进一步完善SICAS模型的相关研究。

随着互联网技术的飞速发展，社交媒体已成为品牌管理不可或缺的一部分。社交媒体数量庞大的用户群体为企业提供了与消费者直接沟通的机会。品牌认知是品牌管理中的重要环节，而社交媒体营销作为一种新兴的营销方式，对品牌认知产生了深远影响。探讨社交媒体营销对品牌认知的影响，分析其作用机制和影响因素，有利于为企业制定有效的社交媒体营销策略提供理论依据和实践指导，可以从理论层面丰富和完善品牌认知和社交媒体营销的理论体系，为后续研究提供参考，还可以从实践层面帮助企业更好地利用社交媒体平台提升品牌认知度，增强品牌竞争力。

本研究深度剖析了社交媒体营销于数字经济时代的重要意义、策略的拟定与施行以及未来的趋向和挑战。首先，对社交媒体营销的界定、演进及其在数字经济时代的价值予以解析，涵盖了强化品牌知名度、提高用户参与度以及达成精准营销等方面。其次，详尽阐释了社交媒体营销策略的构建流程，牵涉到目标市场的定位、内容的创意与传播策略以及施行的步骤。最后，此文研讨了技术革新给社交媒体营销带来的影响，例如人工智能和大数据的运用，并剖析了所面临的挑战，诸如法规政策的约束、竞争对手的策略以及消费者隐私的保护，同时展望了社交媒体营销的未来发展走向。

本文以小红书为研究对象，探讨社交媒体营销对电子商务品牌推广的影响机制及实践策略。通过分析小红书的用户画像、内容生态、技术驱动模式和合作案例发现，社交媒体营销通过精准用户定位、KOL/KOC影响力、UGC内容生态和互动机制，显著提升了品牌曝光度、用户信任度及销售转化率。在此基础上，本文进一步提出并阐释了“内容 + 社交 + 技术”三位一体的营销策略框架，为电商平台及品牌方提供理论参考与实践启示。

随着数字技术的普及，社交媒体已从单纯的社交工具转变为影响消费者购买决策的关键渠道。在当前大力发展新质生产力的背景下，本文基于社会影响理论、信息传播理论等理论基础，系统分析社交媒体的信息特征对消费者购买决策的影响，深入剖析其内在心理机制，并比较不同社交媒体平台的差异化影响。研究表明，社交媒体通过构建从认知建立、情感共鸣到购买意愿的递进式影响链条，将营销信息有效转化为消费者的心理认同，最终促成购买行为。针对当前存在的虚假信息、算法偏见等问题，本文从内容生态构建、意见领袖定位、数据驱动优化等维度提出营销策略建议，旨在为企业在社交时代构建与消费者之间的长效互动关系提供理论依据和实践指导。

随着社交媒体平台的快速发展，社交媒体广告已成为品牌推广和营销的重要手段。本文对社交媒体广告的现状、效果影响因素及优化策略进行了系统分析。首先，介绍了社交媒体广告的定义及其三种主要形式：信息流广告、原生广告和互动广告。随后，从用户因素、广告内容因素和平台因素三个方面探讨了社交媒体广告效果的影响因素。最后，提出了优化广告内容、增强用户互动和精准投放等提升广告效果的策略。研究结果表明，通过精准定位目标受众、优化投放时间和形式，广告主可以有效提升社交媒体广告的效果，增强品牌影响力和用户参与度。

随着社交媒体的快速发展，网络营销已成为品牌推广和市场竞争的重要手段。本文以天水麻辣烫为例，深入分析其在社交媒体环境下采取的网络营销策略及其成效。分析了社交媒体营销的关键特征，包括互动性、即时性、用户生成内容和精准定位，并深入研究了这些特征如何助力天水麻辣烫在网络营销中的应用，如内容营销、口碑营销、社区互动营销以及广告营销等重要手段，并据此提出了创新营销内容与手段、整合线上线下资源、维护口碑与品牌形象以及打造全方位社交平台网络体系等优化建议，旨在为类似品牌提供参考。

随着社交媒体的迅猛发展，主流媒体面临着前所未有的机遇与挑战。如何有效利用社交平台，提升传播力与经营力，成为主流媒体亟待解决的问题。本文通过对国内外头部社交媒体平台的发展现状、平台特征、算法、运营规则及商业模式的深入分析，结合国外媒体机构在社交平台上的传播案例，提出了国内主流媒体应如何借助社交媒体平台，提升传播效能以及探索经营模式的突破，实现传播力和经营力的双重提升。

随着心理健康需求的提升，正念APP在中国市场快速发展，社交媒体营销为其推广提供了关键支持。本文借鉴国外正念APP (如Headspace和Calm)的成功经验，探讨情感化内容、用户生成内容(UGC)及精准广告投放等策略在提升品牌知名度和用户参与度方面的有效性。结合中国市场的本土化需求，正念APP应通过优化内容和构建用户社区以增强品牌忠诚度。未来，正念APP可进一步融合新技术并拓展跨平台合作，推动品牌的可持续发展与竞争力提升。

网络数字时代，文旅产品的议价能力已经从供应商转移到消费者，文旅产业需要从引导消费者决策的角度提升市场营销。本文探讨了用户生成内容(UGC)的发展，特别是社交网络媒体如微博、微信、抖音对文旅产业的促进作用。这种基于对用户生成内容的深度挖掘可以改变文旅产品供给、降低营销成本、进行精准营销。用户生成内容、点对点网络应用程序和虚拟社区的发展是未来文旅产业的发展方向。与旅行社相比，消费者更信任有评论的社交网站，在线消费者往往把用户生成内容视为一种更可靠和有用的网络信息，因为它是消费者的亲身感受而不是推销旅游产品。基于用户生成内容的社交网络媒体改变了文化旅游产品供给侧结构，降低文化旅游产品营销的成本，可以提供更好的信息服务，满足个性化需求，达到精准营销效果，基于此本文提出了社交网络媒体促进文旅产品的营销策略。

互联网的快速发展为企业在社交媒体上拉近与消费者的距离，建立品牌形象提供了途径。本文以小米和vivo为研究对象，基于品牌形象综合测评模型，采用数据挖掘的方法对小米和vivo微博超话中的用户评论进行研究，比较社交媒体呈现的与企业欲塑造的品牌形象之间的差异，为企业在社交媒体视域下如何塑造品牌形象提供参考建议。结果显示：小米和vivo现阶段的网络差评大多来自产品质量、售后态度问题，通过社交媒体塑造的品牌形象在长期维持方面存在改进空间。企业在社交媒体营销过程中，既要通过营销策略塑造良好的品牌形象，又要注重用户生成内容对品牌形象的影响，实现品牌形象维持与用户认知的匹配。

互联网的发展对于媒体行业新的经济形态的出现也提供了良好的条件。区别于传统媒体的新媒体借着互联网的优势不断发展，传统媒体在信息和观点传递上的各种限制被互联网新媒体传播所打破。本文以网红经济为例分析了媒体行业商业模式创新，在分析网红经济现状和问题的基础上，本文提出了网红经济发展对策。

基于社交媒体平台上的品牌营销进入重要的转型阶段，时尚杂志在互联网热潮中谨慎掌握船舵，航行于竞争激烈的社交媒体海洋中。社交媒体已经成为现如今获取信息、通讯交流、发表言论、走向世界的重要渠道，庞大的用户基数和便利快捷的传播渠道吸引各大时尚杂志的驻扎。社会结构的变迁、媒介技术的变革以及消费者偏好的影响，为《ELLE世界时尚之苑》时尚平民化营销模式提供了可能性。《ELLE世界时尚之苑》基于自身原有的强有力的品牌营销策略，展开品牌符号再定义、跨平台协作的差异营销和线上线下联合的社交营销的时尚平民化营销路径，成功实现品牌知名度和用户粘性度的上升，跻身于时尚杂志的前列。

随着社交媒体的快速发展，自媒体营销成为企业推广产品和服务的重要手段之一。本研究以抖音为例，深入探讨了在该平台上的自媒体营销策略。通过对抖音上成功自媒体账号的案例分析，本文从内容创作、互动性、粉丝管理等方面进行了深入剖析。首先，研究揭示了成功抖音自媒体账号的内容创作关键因素，包括内容创意、时效性和用户体验。其次，对互动性进行研究发现，有效的互动可以促进粉丝黏性和社群建设。最后，本文还探讨了粉丝管理的重要性，包括粉丝增长、维护和转化等方面的策略。通过对抖音自媒体营销的深入分析，本研究旨在为企业提供在社交媒体平台上制定有效自媒体营销策略的参考，促进品牌推广和市场拓展的成功实践。

随着社交媒体平台向商业化生态转型，用户被动接触商品信息的偶遇行为成为用户消费决策的重要路径。本研究基于网络营销实践需求，采用眼动追踪、屏幕行为记录及半结构化访谈的混合方法，对31名抖音与小红书用户展开对照实验，分析主动搜索与自由浏览场景下商品信息偶遇的行为机制。研究发现：1) 自由浏览情境的信息偶遇发生概率显著高于定向搜索情境，用户认知目标的明确性对偶遇行为具有抑制作用；2) 视觉注意力呈现“图像优先”特征，商品展示图的注视密度较文字更高，揭示碎片化浏览场景下的认知捷径依赖；3) 尽管跨平台差异未达统计显著性，但中等效应量暗示短视频(抖音)与图文社区(小红书)的界面设计可能影响用户信息偶遇模式。基于实证结论，研究提出动态平衡推荐精准度与多样性、强化前3秒视觉冲击设计、构建跨平台行为转化漏斗及公私域协同引流机制等策略，为提升社交媒体营销转化效能提供理论依据与实践路径。

随着社交电商的迅猛发展，用户生成内容(以下简称UGC)在构建品牌忠诚方面发挥着越来越重要的作用。UGC具有真实性、情感性和互动性等特点，其可以通过增强消费者的信任，提高消费者参与感，增加品牌曝光，从而促进品牌忠诚。首先，UGC的真实性和可信度高于品牌自身宣传，更能提高消费者对产品的信赖。其次，UGC能够调动用户的积极性，让用户在创造、共享的同时，与品牌产生更强的感情连接。同时，社会化网络环境下UGC的扩散，也能拓展其对品牌的影响，从而获得更多的潜在消费者。通过收集、筛选和展示UGC，并通过与用户交互反馈，进一步巩固用户忠诚度。例如，小红书就是以UGC为基础，构建了活跃的社群氛围，在社群中，品牌可以参与讨论，从而增强用户对该品牌的认同感和归属感。UGC通过增强信任、情感联结、互动参与和社群建构等方式影响消费者对用户的忠诚，为品牌在竞争环境下的发展提出新的营销战略和成长途径。

信息技术的发展不断重塑着传媒业生态。近年来，生成式人工智能技术逐渐发展并渗透到新媒体行业，在内容产品、盈利模式、技术创新等方面为行业赋能，带来了前所未有的机遇和挑战。本研究采用混合研究方法，整合文本分析法与半结构化深度访谈法，以内容创作平台小红书为切入口，通过分析生成式人工智能在社交媒体内容设计中的应用现状、具体应用情况和存在问题，深刻挖掘生成式人工智能对新媒体平台内容设计的影响，并在此基础上为提升平台的内容质量和生产效率、营造良好的媒介生态提供可行性建议。

在社交媒体蓬勃发展的时代，信息偶遇逐渐成为用户获取信息的重要方式，而分享行为则是信息传播的关键环节。本研究以小红书APP为对象，深入探究社交媒体中用户信息偶遇分享行为的影响因素。通过文献研究与实证分析，发现信息特征(如新奇性、实用性)、用户个体因素(如社交需求、自我呈现动机)、平台环境(如交互设计、社区氛围)均对用户信息偶遇分享行为产生显著影响。新奇有趣、实用价值高的信息更易引发用户分享；用户为满足社交需求、塑造个人形象，也倾向于分享偶遇信息；小红书良好的交互设计与活跃的社区氛围，进一步推动了分享行为。研究揭示了社交媒体用户信息偶遇分享行为的内在机制，为优化平台运营、提升信息传播效果提供了理论依据与实践参考。

针对社交电商在多平台和多触点环境下“效率–规模–结构”难以协同的运营现状，本研究融合媒体整合与用户生命周期理论，构建了一个涵盖“投放–触达–点击–下单–激活–留存–变现”全链路的一体化机制模型。该模型创新性地引入了达人协同乘子、内容一致性约束与服务质量的留存效应，并设定了多触点公平归因与跨期净收益优化的目标。基于MATLAB的仿真结果表明：渠道投放的触达效果呈现显著的边际递减规律；点击与转化率对内容质量与合规治理最为敏感；头部与口碑达人的协同存在最优区间，过度触达将削弱其乘数效应。本研究在理论上实现了媒介策略与用户运营在统一框架下的机理贯通，在管理上为优化资源配置提供了参考增长路径。

随着互联网的崛起，小红书成为被Z世代所喜爱的社交电商平台。小红书的“种草”文化、技术支持和兴趣圈子，是Z世代在小红书上消费的主要原因，但也存在着盲目消费、攀比消费、片面消费等现象，对Z世代的消费理念和价值观产生很大影响。因此，本文以小红书为例，主要从平台中Z世代用户特征出发，分析社交电商平台对Z世代消费行为的影响，从小红书平台Z世代用户消费存在的问题入手，探索提升Z世代消费体验的路径。

抖音作为一款音乐创意类短视频社交软件，是当前人们在日常生活中的重要社交工具。社交媒体一般拥有点赞、评论、关注、私信、直播等功能。截至2023年，抖音在此基础上，推出了“共创视频”、“视频回复”、“一起看视频”、“抖音时刻”等衍生功能，为用户交流互动提供了便利。本文从社交互动的角度出发，以用户的人际交往需求为基础，围绕抖音各项衍生功能，对其强化用户的社交行为进行优势分析。结果表明，抖音新推出的人性化的社交功能设计有效推动了视频创作者之间、视频创作者与用户、用户之间的良好互动，满足了用户社交需求，丰富了用户使用体验。

本研究聚焦电子商务平台，深入剖析用户生成内容(UGC)对销售绩效的影响。通过综合分析大量电商平台数据，结合消费者行为理论，从UGC的数量、质量、情感倾向等维度，探究其如何作用于消费者购买决策，进而影响销售绩效。研究发现，高质量、积极情感倾向的UGC能显著提升销售绩效，为电商平台和商家优化运营策略、提升销售业绩提供了理论依据和实践指导。

《健康中国2030》的纲要强调了社交媒体在健康信息传播中的应用。社交媒体促成的健康知识交流在很大程度上依赖于接受者采纳和分享知识的行为，这取决于他们对来源、内容以及信息源的综合感知。然而，这些因素对健康信息采纳和分享行为影响的差异性却很少得到关注。基于精细加工可能性模型和用户参与的相关理论文献，以医疗健康类微信公众号为背景，从中心路径(信息质量)和边缘路径(来源可信度、内容感知价值和感知有用性)出发，探究用户对健康信息采纳和分享行为的影响机制及其差异。为验证所提模型和假设，采用在线情景问卷调研方法收集数据并实证检验，结果显示：1) 内容感知价值和有用性对两种用户互动行为的影响均显著强于来源可信度和信息质量；2) 感知有用性对采纳行为的影响显著强于分享行为。研究结论丰富了在线健康信息用户参与相关的文献，并为医疗机构有效利用社交媒体进行健康信息传播提供实践参考。

在数字技术驱动经济形态转型升级的背景下，社交电商平台面临着流量红利消退与商业伦理失衡的双重困境。本研究基于AARRR模型理论框架，系统解构社交电商平台抖音通过用户获取、用户激活、用户留存、获得收益及推荐传播的协同运作实现用户指数级增长的运营范式。研究发现，平台在用户规模扩张过程中需要同步构建智能内容生成算法体系、升级用户数据隐私保护的制度以及建设商品质量标准化管控，以实现商业价值与社会责任的动态平衡。

随着数字化转型和移动互联网的普及，自媒体平台迅速崛起，成为信息传播和社交互动的重要载体。其互动性特征，如评论、点赞、分享、转发等，为用户提供了参与内容创作和表达意见的空间，也改变了消费者的购买决策和消费行为。本文旨在探讨自媒体平台的互动性如何影响受众的购买决策。文章首先分析了自媒体平台的发展现状，指出其内容形式多样化、用户规模庞大且互动性强。接着从消费心理学视角出发，分析了互动性对受众认知、情感、行为等多个层面的影响，总结出互动性内容能促进受众对品牌和产品的认知加工，引发积极情感体验，并通过社会影响、社会认同和群体影响等机制，最终影响购买行为。文章最后提出了针对品牌方、自媒体平台和消费者的建议，以促进自媒体平台的健康发展。

在口碑驱动的消费行为下，企业为了发挥消费者推荐的作用，在运营中投入一笔费用对消费者生成内容(UGC)进行管理干预以刺激更多的消费者购买产品。在此背景下，本文构建了企业质量信息非对称下企业与消费者之间的两阶段策略性竞争博弈模型，研究新消费品牌企业是否应该支付信息租金通过UGC运营投入决策实现信号传递，从而对消费者披露其真实类型，同时本文研究消费者对于用户生成内容(UGC)的敏感程度对企业决策的影响。研究发现：完全信息下，高质量类型的企业更愿意投入高成本用于UGC运营；不完全信息下，企业和消费者的信号博弈可以得到分离均衡解和混同均衡解，企业选择分离均衡或混同均衡与企业为高类型的初始概率以及高低类型企业的质量差异有关；同时，本文还探究了消费者对于UGC内容的敏感程度如何影响企业的UGC运营投入决策。

本文通过分析社交媒体数据，探讨中国公众对AI生成肖像图像的态度，为后续AI技术的发展以及在电子商务中的运用提供理论支持与建议。本研究采用文本挖掘方法，通过对社交媒体文本数据进行语义网络分析以识别公众关注点，借助情感分析评估公众情绪取向，并最终通过主题聚类揭示正面及负面评论背后的主要原因。2023年围绕AI生成肖像图像的讨论呈现出波动性特征。76.84%的评论表达了正面情绪，主要归因于：(1) 对现有AI生成肖像质量的满意度；(2) 对未来AI技术发展的乐观态度。而19.02%的评论则表达了负面情绪，主要原因包括：(1) 当前AI生成肖像细节不足；(2) 对比美国，担忧中国在AI技术上的落后；(3) 担心AI技术取代人力劳动；(4) 关于AI技术的法律问题及对艺术就业市场的潜在冲击。

随着社交媒体带动电商产业发展，用户从接触产品、了解产品到购买产品的路径正在急速缩短，特别是作为图片社交媒体的小红书平台。研究发现，小红书通过KOL和UGC内容激发用户即时购买欲，包括视觉呈现、场景构建、社交互动、博主的个人特质等。其中用户在上行比较中追求理想生活范式，易受博主推荐影响而冲动消费；较近的社交距离引起的平行比较，也容易触发用户的信任消费。同时，“即看即买”也可能导致可持续性问题和引发心理健康风险。

随着数字化时代的到来，社交媒体已深刻影响人们的生活方式，特别在大学生群体中，其消费行为受社交媒体互动影响显著。本研究基于当前社交媒体用户快速增长的背景，聚焦于大学生群体，旨在探讨社交媒体互动与其品牌偏好及购买决策之间的关系。通过文献研究和问卷调查，本研究发现社交媒体互动不仅增强了大学生对品牌信息的获取和认知，还通过情感连接与价值认同构建了深厚的品牌忠诚度。大学生在社交媒体中倾向于信任其他用户的体验评价，这些信息虽然不完全理性和客观，但对其购买决策具有重要影响。此外，社交影响与群体认同也显著影响大学生的购买意愿，真实感成为影响大学生购买决策的关键因素。基于以上研究，本文提出对社交媒体品牌营销策略的建议，强调利用社交媒体互动加强品牌与大学生之间的情感连接，并建议政策制定者关注社交媒体信息的真实性，保护消费者权益。

本文研究社交媒体情境下消费者价值共创对安踏品牌忠诚度的影响。首先梳理相关理论，将价值共创分为生产、消费、虚拟品牌社区领域，品牌忠诚度分为态度、行为、复合维度。接着分析各领域对安踏品牌忠诚度的影响：生产领域通过产品设计研发增强情感，促进购买和口碑传播，深化认知；消费领域在购买售后互动中提升体验，增加频率，塑造形象；虚拟品牌社区通过活动增强归属感，刺激购买，拓展认知。研究表明各领域在不同维度对品牌忠诚度有积极影响，为品牌战略的制定提供了参考。

本研究分析了海底捞的线上营销策略及其面临的挑战与应对措施。通过深入探讨海底捞的品牌定位、市场环境以及线上营销渠道的构建，本文揭示了海底捞如何在竞争激烈的餐饮行业中通过创新的社交媒体营销、大数据与人工智能技术、线上线下融合以及个性化定制来提升品牌影响力。研究还深入分析了海底捞在线上营销过程中遇到的市场竞争压力、技术难题、品牌形象与线上体验的矛盾以及资源管理问题，提出了相应的应对策略。本文为海底捞及其他餐饮企业在面对类似挑战时提供了重要的启示和参考。

在数字化浪潮下，直播电商作为新兴商业模式，凭借丰富的社交互动元素推动消费增长。本文通过信息加工理论视角剖析社交互动的分类、作用以及直播电商中社交互动的形式，发现其能从提升购买意愿、扩展信息渠道、塑造消费价值观以及提供消费知识与技能等方面，全面影响消费者的决策过程。基于此，商家可以利用社交媒体扩大影响力，并精准选择合作主播，优化直播互动策略，以促进商家与消费者之间的社交互动，提升消费者的购买意愿。

本研究基于抽象营销与IP理论，探讨多邻国如何借助其标志性IP形象Duo，通过整合抽象文化元素，实现品牌破圈与市场扩展。本篇文章首先回溯了“抽象”概念的哲学起源及其在数字化背景下向文化形态演变的整体过程；随后，从视觉锤、IP拟人化、跨界联名、游戏化机制及用户共创等维度，分析多邻国在全球语言学习市场中的营销策略创新。经研究发现，多邻国不仅通过情感化的品牌表达和多触点的营销构建了强烈的用户认同，还依托于技术赋能与场景化延伸手段，实现线上线下互动的营销闭环。基于多邻国营销实践对在线教育平台的启示，本文又进一步为教育平台在全球化竞争中平衡娱乐化与专业性提供了理论与实证借鉴。

作为国内社交电商的典型平台，小红书KOL种草的消费模式为电商场域注入了新的活力。本研究聚焦小红书平台，基于消费者行为路径理论探讨KOL种草行为对电商行业当中消费者消费路径的影响。通过梳理小红书平台KOL种草发展现状，从“认知、兴趣、评估、购买、忠诚”五个阶段分析KOL在小红书的作用、影响力，现存问题及营销优化策略，旨在为电商平台及品牌提供针对性建议，助力其更好利用KOL资源引导消费者行为，提升市场竞争力，推动社交电商行业的健康发展。

近年来，“国潮”现象蓬勃兴起。以李宁、花西子为代表的品牌，通过融合传统与现代的设计，在社交平台上引发了广泛关注。本研究以此为例，聚焦于用户情感反应，旨在探讨国潮品牌如何与用户建立深层连接。研究采用扎根理论方法，对社交平台的用户评论进行了质性分析。通过系统编码，揭示了影响用户情感共鸣的关键维度，并初步比较了不同品类品牌(运动服饰与美妆)的异同。分析发现，尽管存在品类差异，但其情感共鸣的形成遵循一条相通的内在逻辑路径。用户与品牌的互动呈现出独特的阶段性特征，是多因素复杂作用的结果。基于此发现，本研究为国潮品牌优化网络传播、增强用户认同提供了方向性建议，为其实现情感驱动下的长效发展提供了有益思考。

隐性广告通过将商品和品牌信息巧妙地融入到内容载体中，与载体共同构成受众所能感知的信息内容，从而实现广告信息的隐性传递。这种广告形式利用受众对内容的关注，以一种不易察觉的手段实现广告价值的最大化，从而在受众中建立起品牌意识和偏好。作为一个用户基数庞大的新兴社交媒体平台，小红书以“高互动性”和“高真实性”的优势开创了跨境电商的新模式，平台的内容管控和审查机制为隐性广告的实施提供了规范和指导，确保广告内容的质量和受众体验的优化。通过这种方式，平台能够在保证内容生态多样性和丰富性的同时，引导内容生产者创作更高质量、更具吸引力、更符合平台和受众需求的内容。本文主要对小红书平台隐性广告的运营逻辑进行分析，旨在探究社交媒体中隐性广告的发展方向。

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Social media outlets constitute excellent vehicles for fostering relationships with customers. One specific way to do this is to create brand fan pages on social networking sites. Companies can place brand posts (containing videos, messages, quizzes, information, and other material) on these brand fan pages. Customers can become fans of these brand fan pages, and subsequently indicate that they like the brand post or comment on it. This liking and commenting on brand posts reflects brand post popularity. In this article, we determine possible drivers for brand post popularity. We analyze 355 brand posts from 11 international brands spread across six product categories. Results show that positioning the brand post on top of the brand fan page enhances brand post popularity. But the findings also indicate that different drivers influence the number of likes and the number of comments. Namely, vivid and interactive brand post characteristics enhance the number of likes. Moreover, the share of positive comments on a brand post is positively related to the number of likes. The number of comments can be enhanced by the interactive brand post characteristic, a question. The shares of both positive and negative comments are positively related to the number of comments. Managers of brands that operate brand fan pages can be guided by our research with regards to deciding which characteristics or content to place at brand posts.

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Are you looking to take advantage of social media for your business or organization? With easy-to-understand introductions to blogging, forums, opinion and review sites, and social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, this book will help you choose the best -- and avoid the worst -- of the social web's unique marketing opportunities. Social Media Marketing Book guides you through the maze of communities, platforms, and social media tools so you can decide which ones to use, and how to use them most effectively. With an objective approach and clear, straightforward language, Dan Zarrella, aka The Social Media & Marketing Scientist, shows you how to plan and implement campaigns intelligently, and then measure results and track return on investment. Whether you're a seasoned pro or new to the social web, this book will take you beyond the jargon to social media marketing mastery. Make sense of this complicated environment with the help of screenshots, graphs, and visual explanations Understand the history and culture of each social media type, including features, functionality, and protocols Get clear-cut explanations of the methods you need to trigger viral marketing successes Choose the technologies and marketing tactics most relevant to your campaign goals Learn how to set specific goals for your campaigns and evaluate them according to key performance indicators

ABSTRACT This study employed a content analysis of the creative strategies present in the social media content shared by a sample of top brands. The results reveal which social media channels are being used, which creative strategies/appeals are being used, and how these channels and strategies relate to consumer engagement in branded social media. Past research has suggested that brands should focus on maintaining a social presence across social channels with content that is fresh and frequent and includes incentives for consumer participation (Ling et al., 2004). This study confirmed the importance of frequent updates and incentives for participation. In addition, several creative strategies were associated with customer engagement, specifically experiential, image, and exclusivity messages. Despite the value of these creative approaches, most branded social content can be categorized as functional.

Abstract Although social media use is gaining increasing importance as a component of firms’ portfolio of strategies, scant research has systematically consolidated and extended knowledge on social media marketing strategies (SMMSs). To fill this research gap, we first define SMMS, using social media and marketing strategy dimensions. This is followed by a conceptualization of the developmental process of SMMSs, which comprises four major components, namely drivers, inputs, throughputs, and outputs. Next, we propose a taxonomy that classifies SMMSs into four types according to their strategic maturity level: social commerce strategy, social content strategy, social monitoring strategy, and social CRM strategy. We subsequently validate this taxonomy of SMMSs using information derived from prior empirical studies, as well with data collected from in-depth interviews and a quantitive survey among social media marketing managers. Finally, we suggest fruitful directions for future research based on input received from scholars specializing in the field.

If the idea of starting a social media marketing campaign overwhelms you, the author of Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day will introduce you to the basics, demonstrate how to manage details and describe how you can track results. Case studies, step-by-step guides, checklists, quizzes and hands-on tutorials will help you execute a social media marketing campaign in just one hour a day. In addition, learn how to integrate social media metrics with traditional media measurements and how to leverage blogs, RSS feeds, podcasts, and user-generated content sharing sites like YouTube.

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NOTICE: this is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Industrial Marketing Management. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.indmarman.2011.09.009

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Luxury brands have always been fashion industry leaders, with admirable aesthetic value and innovative yet traditional business management. The brands constantly struggle to secure profits by providing novel value to customers through quality products and services, customer management, retail strategies, and innovative marketing mixes. However, the recent entry of numerous fashion brands in the luxury market coupled with decreased sales related to economic downturns have led to new challenges for luxury firms. Because the luxury fashion business is considered high value-added with guaranteed high profit margins and secure regular customers, the lower sectors have begun to heat up the competition. To survive the recent unforeseen challenges of heated competition, they have turned toward marketing communication using social media. Social media are the two-way communication platforms that allow users to interact with each other online to share information and opinions. Use of social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook has already expanded to almost every luxury fashion brand and been evaluated as business take-off tools. With the increased use of social media as a means of marketing communication for luxury brands, it has become necessary to empirically analyze the effect of social media marketing (SMM). Thus, the study presented here investigated the effects of this SMM on customer relationships (involving intimacy and trust) and purchase intention. A preliminary test was conducted in order to draw a sample of a luxury fashion brand for this study. Self-administrated questionnaires with visual stimuli were used to collect data from luxury consumers in the Seoul area. Respondents were restricted to consumers who had purchased any luxury fashion brand item within the previous two years. Among 150 questionnaires distributed, 133 questionnaires were finally employed for statistical analysis. Principal component analysis using varimax rotation was conducted to figure out the properties of luxury fashion brands’ SMM. The social media contained five properties: entertainment, customization, interaction, word of mouth, and trend. Factor loadings ranged from .84 to .52. Cronbach’s α lay between .80 and .88, demonstrating adequate construct reliability. Multiple regression analysis was conducted to test the effects of SMM on customer relationship (i.e., intimacy and trust) and purchase intention, as well as relationship between customer relationship (i.e., intimacy and trust) and purchase intention. Results show that entertainment has a significant positive effect on intimacy (β=.25, t=3.48, p<.01), trust (β=.34, t=5.75, p<.001), and purchase intention (β=.31, t=4.32, p<.001). Other positive effects are customization on trust (β=.13, t=2.28, p<.05), interaction on purchase intention (β=.25, t=3, 54, p<.01), word of mouth on intimacy (β=.14, t=1.92, p<.05) and purchase intention (β=.19, t=2.65, p<.01), and trend only on trust (β=.32, t=5.30, p<.001). It seems that entertainment, customization, and trend were satisfying what customers expected from a luxury fashion brand. Because the luxury industry aims to provide value to customers in every way possible, the brands should focus on providing free entertainment content, customized services, and trend forward social media site which all act positively toward enhancing customer relationship. Trust has a significant relationship with purchase intention (β=.34, t=4.85, p<.001). Since the trust variable within a customer relationship was only significantly associated with purchase intention, the mediating effects of customization and trend were found. The study proves the effectiveness of luxury brands’ SMM on both customer relationships and purchase intention, and proposes a strategy to enhance the brands’ performance by defining specific factors influencing both. The result show that the chosen brand’s SMM includes distinctive elements in comparison to old-fashioned marketing performances. Every property found in luxury brands’ SMM positively influenced customer relationships and purchase intention, with entertainment affecting more variables than any other properties. Luxury brands should heavily supply an entertainment aspect of social media contents and activities. Every activity enabled by use of the media, such as creating relationships with other users, providing customized service and free entertainment contents, and obtaining genuine information on personal interest should all be entertaining. By focusing on providing such features, customer relationships and purchase intention will be enhanced. Concerning the association between customer relationship and purchase intention, trust and purchase intention were highly related. Customers’ trust was strengthened via interaction with other users as well as brand on social media sites. Trust gained while enjoying entertainment and communication provided on the sites seems to contribute greatly toward a luxury brand’s profit. With the growing interest of luxury fashion brands in providing luxurious value to customers in every way possible, using social media appears to be appropriate for retaining old customers and attracting cross-shoppers. As competition among luxury fashion brands becomes more intense by providing plenty of alternatives to customers, the brands’ prosperity seems no longer quite so promising. The importance of managing customers as valuable assets cannot be emphasized more. As such, more luxury brands should engage in social media marketing activities to anticipate a positive contribution to the brands by providing new luxury value to customers.

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Purpose This paper aims to examine the influence of interactive social media marketing communications on teenagers’ cognitive, affective and behavioral attitude components in South Africa. The study also considers the impact of a number of additional factors such as usage (access, length of usage, log-on frequency, log-on duration and profile update incidence) and demographic (gender, age and population group) variables on young consumers’ attitudes toward social media marketing communications. Design/methodology/approach A survey was used via three self-administered questionnaires, which were distributed to over 13,000 learners in the age range of 13-18 years (Generation Z cohort) at colleges and high schools in South Africa. A generalized linear model was used for statistical data analysis. Findings The study ascertained that social media marketing communications had a positive on each attitude component among adolescents, but on a declining scale, which correlates to the purchase funnel. The results also revealed that teenagers who used social media for long time periods; updated their profiles frequently and were from the Colored and Black population groups, displayed the most favorable attitudinal responses to social media marketing communications. Research limitations/implications Social media was collectively analyzed and did not consider the number of different social media types, which could be examined individually. This investigation only considered the Generation Z cohort, but other cohorts to attitudes toward social media marketing communications could also be assessed. Practical implications Companies and their brands should consider using and/or adapting their strategies based on the declining impact of social media marketing communications on the hierarchical attitude stages among young consumers and the divergent influence on usage and demographic variables when targeting the lucrative and technologically advanced, but capricious, Generation Z consumers. Originality/value This research established that social media marketing communications had a favorable influence on cognitive, affective and behavioral attitude components among young consumers, but on a declining scale, which is in congruence with the purchase funnel model. This investigation also makes an important contribution to attitudinal research in developing countries, where there is a lack of research in social media marketing communications.

The Social Media have changed the power structures in the marketplace; evidence points to a major power migration taking place and to emergence of a new breed of powerful and sophisticated customer, difficult to influence, persuade and retain The paper outlines the nature, effects and present status of the Social Media, underlying their role as customer empowerment agents. It explains their aptitude and possible roles as part of the corporate Marketing strategy and identifies different ways of engaging them as marketing tools. The paper proposes two possible Social Media marketing strategies: a. The passive approach focusing on utilizing the Social Media domain as source of customer voice and market intelligence. b. The active approach i.e. engaging the Social Media as direct marketing and PR channels, as channels of customer influence, as tools of personalizing products and last but not least develop them as platforms of co-operation and customer-generated innovation. Finally the paper identifies future research directions around this new element of the marketing landscape

The aim of this research is to examine the effect of social media marketing activities on brand awareness, brand image and brand loyalty. In addition, it has been aimed to analyze the effect of brand awareness and brand image on brand loyalty in this research. The population of the research consists of the consumers who actively follow five brands with the highest social score according to the Marketing Turkey social media brand performance data on social media communication channels such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. In this research, quantitative method has been used and research data has been obtained via online questionnaires shared on social media from 547 brand followers with applying convenience sampling method. The obtained data have been analyzed by structural equation modeling (SEM). As a result of the analysis, social media marketing activities have been found as effective factors on brand image and brand loyalty, besides it has been determined that the most obvious effect seen on brand awareness. In addition, it has been found out that brand awareness and brand image have a significant effect on brand loyalty. Furthermore, in the research, it has been achieved that the brand awareness has a limited effect on the brand image.

Social media has been playing an important role in marketing strategy. As a part of social media, social networking sites (SNS) can be utilized by enterprises to create direct communication and good relationships with their customers. Therefore, enterprises using SNS have to select the right marketing content to enhance strong customer relationships, which lead to their behavior generating sustainable performance for enterprises. This research considered social media marketing activity (SMMA) and Customer Experience (CX) to measure the customer’s relationship quality, which can impact customer behavioral outcomes, which are purchase intention, loyalty intention, and participation intention. The 413 online questionnaire surveys were measured and analyzed using SmartPLS 3. The results show that SMMA and CX have a significant influence on the customer relationship quality, which also leads to a positive impact on customer behavioral outcomes. This research guides enterprises that SNS’s marketing content has to follow SMMA and CX dimensions to achieve the marketing objective and generate sustainable performance for enterprises.

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How to implement social technology in business, spur collaborative innovation and drive winning programs to improve products, services, and long-term profits and growth. The road to social media marketing is now well paved: A July 2009 Anderson Analytics study found 60% of the Internet population uses social networks and social media sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. Collaboration and innovation, driven by social technology, are whats next. Written by the author of the bestselling Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day in collaboration with Jake McKee, Social Media Marketing: The Next Generation of Business Engagementtakes marketers, product managers, small business owners, senior executives and organizational leaders on to the next step in social technology and its application in business. In particular, this book explains how to successfully implement a variety tools, how to ensure higher levels of customer engagement, and how to build on the lessons learned and information gleaned from first-generation social media marketing efforts and to carry this across your organization. This book: Details how to develop, implement, monitor and measure successful social media activities, and how to successfully act on feedback from the social web Discusses conversation-monitoring tools and platforms to accelerate the business innovation cycle along with the metrics required to prove the success of social technology adoption Connects the social dots more deeply across the entire organization, moving beyond marketing and into product development, customer service and customer-driven innovation, and the benefits of encouraging employee collaboration. Social media has become a central component of marketing: Collaborative, social technology is now moving across the organization, into business functions ranging from HR and legal to product management and the supply chain. Social Media Marketing: The Next Generation of Business Engagement is the perfect book for marketers, business unit managers and owners, HR professionals and anyone else looking to better understand how to use social technologies and platforms to build loyalty in customers, employees, partners and suppliers to drive long term growth and profits.

Social media marketing usage and adoption as a new communication tools by organization and SMEs is increasingly globally and offers unique opportunities for small and medium enterprises and marketing researchers to undertake research that will have an impact. The purpose of the paper is to review the academic literature on factors that drive social media marketing adoption in SMEs and organization. The topic enable others to establish a balanced picture of the current state of global social media marketing adoption research. It also offers a useful means to analyze the kinds of research that needs to be pursued to make additional research progress in the related area of social media marketing.

In this era, social media platform is integrated into the marketing strategy. This new technology sets out new mechanisms and communication tools that companies can rely on to interact and engage with actual and potential customers. This study aimed at exploring the impact of social media marketing activities (SMM) on brand loyalty via brand trust and brand equity. Based on an online survey of 287 users who follow telecommunications companies on social media located in Egypt, data was collected and analyzed using structural equation modeling. The results revealed that SMM activities comprise only three dimensions; trendiness, customization and word-of-mouth. These attributes of social media marketing directly influence brand loyalty and indirectly influence brand equity mediated by brand trust. The study emphasis the role of trust and provide guidance toward measuring the effectiveness of social media marketing.

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The purpose of this study is to investigate the extent to which social media marketing is being utilized in the Hong Kong hotel industry. Marketing performance of 67 hotels in Hong Kong on 23 social media sites was evaluated according to 18 criteria adapted from past studies. The results indicate that hotels generally have a poor performance in using social media to learn about customers. Major problems regarding the hotels' social media marketing efforts are identified. Implications behind these problems and recommendations for improvement are made accordingly.

This paper argues that social media metrics should be captured as customer investments in marketers’ social media efforts and that applications considered in concert with performance objectives drive the choice of metrics. Motivating this approach are the “four c’s” that drive consumer use of social media. These include the connections consumers make with each other, the user-generated content they create, their consumption of other users’ content and their control of their own online experiences. Social media metrics that are linked to three broad social media performance objectives are identified for eight general categories of social media applications and the paths managers have for improving social media effectiveness that rely on using these metrics are discussed.

This exploratory research examines how the COVID-19 pandemic led to increases in consumers’ social media marketing behaviors in the United States (U.S.). Previous research on the impact of a pandemic has focused on behavior for preventive health, however, little attention has been given to the impact of a pandemic on consumer behaviors. To bridge this gap, the Consumer Decision-Making Model was used as a framework to investigate changes in consumers’ social media behaviors as they preform various consumer decision-making processes. More specifically, a questionnaire was used to collect survey data from 327 U.S. consumers. Analysis of Variance tests were performed to examine mean differences in consumers’ use of social media as a consumer decision-making tool. The findings showed that consumers have increased their utilization of social media as a tool for identifying products, collecting information on products, evaluating products, and making product purchases. Thus, the findings demonstrate the growing importance of social media marketing since the COVID-19 pandemic began. Given that the COVID-19 pandemic is a global phenomenon, the findings likely can be extrapolated across many nations. Suggestions are provided to help businesses adopt to changes in consumers’ social media behaviors as they relate to the consumer decision-making processes.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of social media marketing activities on brand loyalty, value consciousness and brand consciousness. Design/methodology/approach A self-administered questionnaire was developed and administered to a convenience sample of 346 undergraduate students Findings The findings of this research indicated that social media marketing has a significant effect on brand loyalty; brand consciousness and value consciousness mediate the relationship between social media marketing and brand loyalty. Originality/value This study confirms the growing importance of social media marketing. It also provides insights for marketers on envisioning brand loyalty.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to observe consumers’ attitudes toward and intentions to purchase green products on social media and to explore the relationships among social media marketing, perceived consumer effectiveness (PCE), product knowledge, subjective norms, perceived behavioral control, price consciousness and attitudes toward and intentions to purchase green products. In addition, this research attempts to further understand these relationships in different consumer groups. Design/methodology/approach A questionnaire survey method was used to collect data from consumers in China. The Amos 22.0 software package was used to conduct the data analysis. Findings The empirical results suggest that attitude, subjective norms and perceived behavioral control positively affect purchase intentions, while price consciousness negatively affects purchase intentions. Product knowledge positively affects consumers’ attitudes and purchase intentions, and PCE positively affects consumers’ attitudes. As expected, social media marketing positively affects subjective norms, product knowledge and PCE and negatively affects price consciousness. However, there is no significant relationship between PCE and purchase intentions. According to the results of multigroup structural equation modeling analysis, the effects differ significantly among different consumer groups. Originality/value This study enriches the research about the factors that influence consumers’ purchases of green products in emerging countries in the social media marketing context.

Abstract Social media and social media applications that build consumer communities involving rich user-generated content are new marketplaces and/or tools for marketers. This study aims to specify the factors affecting consumers' attitudes toward marketing with social media. Given this context, a 7-factor, consumer-based attitude scale that contains 32 items was developed, and a questionnaire was completed by undergraduate students between the ages of 18 and 24. Frequencies, t-test, ANOVA, factor analysis, and regression analysis were used for data analysis. In the end, six factors were found to affect consumers' attitudes toward marketing with social media. KEYWORDS: consumer attitudessocial mediasocial media marketingsocial Web Notes Note. VIF = variance inflation factor. Mashups define the new generation of Web-based applications that combine at least two different services (Akar Citation2009, 51). Dündar and Yörük's (2009) methodology was followed in this empirical study.

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Purpose This paper investigates the impact of social-media marketing elements, namely entertainment, customisation, interaction, electronic word-of-mouth (EWOM) and trendiness, on consumer–brand engagement and brand knowledge. Design/methodology/approach Using an online survey, the study collects data in Hong Kong from 214 experienced social-media users, as indicated by their consumption of a durable technology product, a smartphone. We used partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS–SEM) to test the links between social-media marketing elements, consumer–brand engagement and brand knowledge. Findings The results reveal that interaction, electronic word-of-mouth and trendiness are the key elements directly influencing consumer brand engagement, then strengthening brand awareness and brand knowledge. This contrasts with the non-significant results found for the influence of entertainment and customisation on consumer–brand engagement. Research limitations/implications Having cross-sectional nature, the study focuses on one single product, smartphones, at one location, Hong Kong. Future research may enhance the generalisability of the findings by replication in other countries with diverse cultures, such as countries in Latin America and Africa and examine other industries and other products, such as the service sector and convenience products with a low involvement level. Practical implications Marketers may strengthen consumer–brand engagement by using content that is trendy, along with encouraging interaction and positive EWOM on social-media platforms, in order to build strong and positive brand knowledge in consumers' minds. Originality/value This study contributes to the branding literature by providing an understanding of the role of social-media marketing elements in the brand-building process. Social media is a marketing channel recognised by its effectiveness in communicating brand-related information and its role as a means to stimulate consumers' brand engagement and brand knowledge. However, how effective these elements are for these purposes remains to be established. By empirically testing a theoretical model, this study confirms that specific social-media marketing elements, namely interaction, EWOM and trendiness, are critical drivers in the brand-building process in Hong Kong.

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The ready access to and availability of social media has opened up a wealth of data that marketers are leveraging for strategic insight and digital marketing. Yet there is a lack of professional norms regarding the use of social media in marketing and a gap in understanding consumers’ comfort with marketers’ use of their social media data. This study analyzes a census-balanced sample of online adults (n = 751) to identify consumers’ perceptions of using social media data for marketing purposes. The research finds that consumers’ perceived risks and benefits of using social media have a relationship with their comfort with marketers using their publicly available social media data. The research extends the applicability of communication privacy management theory to social media and introduces marketing comfort—a new construct of high importance for future marketing research. Marketing comfort refers to an individual's comfort with the use of information posted publicly on social media for targeted advertising, customer relations, and opinion mining. In the context of the construct development, we find that targeted advertising is the strongest contributing component to marketing comfort, relative to the other two dimensions: opinion mining and customer relations. By understanding what drives consumer comfort with this emerging marketing practice, the research proposes strategies for marketers that can support and mitigate consumers’ concerns so that consumers can maintain trust in marketers’ digital practices.

Social media has become the modus operandi of the 21st century. Building on the foundation of Web 2.0, social media applications have facilitated unprecedented growth in human interaction in modern times. This study attempts to study the impact of social media marketing medium toward brand loyalty and purchase intention in Generation Y. Surveys are conducted randomly and questionnaire distributed to undergraduate students of Malaysian universities. Two Hundred questionnaires were distributed with 75 percent response rate. Two propositions and three hypotheses were developed and tested using mean and regression analysis. The result indicated that the online marketing communications, specifically, E- WOM, online communities and online advertisement are effective in promoting brand loyalty and product purchase intention through company website and social media platforms. These finding indicate to marketing managers that social media marketing medium has become an important marketing tool to reach emerging younger generation consumers. It also indicates that cyber world play an important role in modern marketing, enabling marketers to reach customers faster and more efficiently. This research provides a guideline for global brand players in considering applying social media marketing activities to promote their product, and brand.

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The authors study the effect of word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing on member growth at an Internet social networking site and compare it with traditional marketing vehicles. Because social network sites record the electronic invitations from existing members, outbound WOM can be precisely tracked. Along with traditional marketing, WOM can then be linked to the number of new members subsequently joining the site (sign-ups). Because of the endogeneity among WOM, new sign-ups, and traditional marketing activity, the authors employ a vector autoregressive (VAR) modeling approach. Estimates from the VAR model show that WOM referrals have substantially longer carryover effects than traditional marketing actions and produce substantially higher response elasticities. Based on revenue from advertising impressions served to a new member, the monetary value of a WOM referral can be calculated; this yields an upper-bound estimate for the financial incentives the firm might offer to stimulate WOM.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to understand how consumers may be segmented with respect to their reactions to social network marketing. Design/methodology/approach – Consumers are segmented on the basis of attitudes toward social network marketing and the association among psychological, economic, and socio-demographic covariates are explored using data from 883 consumers and latent-class analysis. Findings – A total of five segments are identified – Passive, Talkers, Hesitant, Active, and Averse – along with significant covariates, such as information search, convenience, entertainment, age and gender that predict membership. Research limitations/implications – Evidence was found of two segments that are highly impacted by social network marketing in terms of brand engagement, purchase intention and WOM referral intention. The most engaged – the Active – representing approximately 10 percent, is most open to interacting with brands in social networks, likely to make a purchase as a result of the campaign, and likely to spread WOM. The second group – Talkers – representing 28 percent, is also high on all outcomes, but not impacted as greatly in terms of purchase intentions. Practical implications – There is a sizable share of the market (38 percent) that can be positively impacted through social network marketing. This paper reinforces that it is problematic to collapse all users of social networks. Originality/value – The paper offers a more nuanced understanding of how consumers engage with social media by focusing on how consumers engage with social network marketing and by employing three segmentation bases: brand engagement, purchase intention, and WOM.

Manuscript type: Research PaperResearch aims: This paper investigates the impact of social networkmarketing on consumer purchase intention and how it is affectedby the mediating role of consumer engagement.Design/ Methodology/ Approach: This study analyses data takenfrom 300 existing users of social network marketing websites inPakistan. Structural equation modelling was employed to test themodel developed.Research findings: Results indicate that social network marketingis significantly related to consumer purchase intention. They furtherdemonstrate that consumer engagement acts as a partial mediatorin how social network marketing impact on consumer purchaseintention.Theoretical contributions/ Originality: This study expands on theexisting research of social network marketing by investigating theindirect effect of consumer engagement on the relationship betweensocial network marketing and consumer purchase intention in thecontext of Pakistan.Practitioner/ Policy implications: The findings drawn from thisstudy imply that marketers should respond to the rising importance of social networking sites because of their powerful influence onconsumer purchase intention. This suggestion can be implementedby companies through the continuous monitoring of consumerconcerns by adjusting their online marketing strategies.Research limitation/ Implications: Future studies should considerusing a qualitative approach, namely interviews to gain a betterunderstanding of consumers’ insights and experiences influencingtheir commitment and purchase intentions. Additionally, moreweight can be added to the literature by comparing the influenceof electronic word-of-mouth e-WOM to the marketing campaignscarried out by various companies in various social websites.

Influence maximization, defined by Kempe, Kleinberg, and Tardos (2003), is the problem of finding a small set of seed nodes in a social network that maximizes the spread of influence under certain influence cascade models. The scalability of influence maximization is a key factor for enabling prevalent viral marketing in large-scale online social networks. Prior solutions, such as the greedy algorithm of Kempe et al. (2003) and its improvements are slow and not scalable, while other heuristic algorithms do not provide consistently good performance on influence spreads. In this paper, we design a new heuristic algorithm that is easily scalable to millions of nodes and edges in our experiments. Our algorithm has a simple tunable parameter for users to control the balance between the running time and the influence spread of the algorithm. Our results from extensive simulations on several real-world and synthetic networks demonstrate that our algorithm is currently the best scalable solution to the influence maximization problem: (a) our algorithm scales beyond million-sized graphs where the greedy algorithm becomes infeasible, and (b) in all size ranges, our algorithm performs consistently well in influence spread --- it is always among the best algorithms, and in most cases it significantly outperforms all other scalable heuristics to as much as 100%--260% increase in influence spread.

A stimulus-response model of location-based social network marketing is conceptualized based on an exploratory investigation. Location-based social network applications are capable of generating marketing stimuli from merchant, competition-based, and connection-based rewards resulted from relevance and connectivity. Depending on consumption situations, consumer characteristics, and social network structure, these rewards lead to actual behavior that manifests in variety behavior (i.e., patronage to new places) and loyalty behavior (i.e., increased frequency of patronage to familiar places). This behavior implies changes in patterns of mobility, making this marketing approach particularly relevant for tourism and hospitality businesses. Managerial implications and recommendations for further studies are provided.

The study explored what benefits to small or medium-sized firms (SMEs) could be derived from the development of a social media marketing strategy. Results indicated that Facebook can facilitate communications between SME companies and customers, and can also be an important tool in creating brand recognition and broadening awareness. The importance of developing a thoughtfully designed strategy was cited, as SMEs often lack sophisticated marketing or business plans. The positive study results suggest that SMEs can derive benefits from a SN (social network) strategy and, in particular, Facebook was shown to be an important channel that enabled small and medium-sized companies to advertise their brands without requiring large budgets. Facebook presents itself as a unique environment that can enable businesses to increase prospective clients and also offer current consumers a closer relationship to the company. As such, the study indicated that presence on social networks can have an important role in both relationship development and increased sales/membership.

As social media increasingly penetrate the business world, it is important to understand the underlying reasons for companies to adopt social networks marketing (SNM). This study extends the technology acceptance model (TAM) to explore the role of social influences in the context of SNM technology adoption by small and medium companies, and considers how the temporal aspect of new technology adoption affects this relationship. Our findings show that adoption of SNM is strongly influenced by social influences from experts, competitors, and customers. These social influences affect intention to adopt this new technology both directly, and by affecting the perceptions of the technology usefulness. For SMEs already using SNM, social influence is the only strong determinant of the intention to continue employing this marketing technology, with the amount of experience with SNM strengthening this relationship.

A social network recruitment campaign was prepared where applicants for information technology bachelor studies at a Norwegian university college were invited to join a Facebook group related to the subject of interest. Each Facebook group was assigned a contact person who received training to facilitate activities and in answering questions from the applicants. Analysis of the dialogues on the Facebook groups indicates value creation between the applicant and the university college, and between applicants. Furthermore, results from the campaign showed that the conversion rate for applicants who apply for a Facebook group was 88.8 per cent, which is significant higher than for those who did not apply for a Facebook group (43.3 per cent). We will argue that social network marketing in higher education gives a great opportunity to replace the passive view of customers with an active view in which applicants are invited to use their own initiatives rather than simply react to predetermined marketing activities.

The purpose of this paper is to reveal how social network marketing (SNM) can affect consumers’ purchase behavior (CPB). We used the combination of structural equation modeling (SEM) and unsupervised machine learning approaches as an innovative method. The statistical population of the study concluded users who live in Hungary and use Facebook Marketplace. This research uses the convenience sampling approach to overcome bias. Out of 475 surveys distributed, a total of 466 respondents successfully filled out the entire survey with a response rate of 98.1%. The results showed that all dimensions of social network marketing, such as entertainment, customization, interaction, WoM and trend, had positively and significantly influenced consumer purchase behavior (CPB) in Facebook Marketplace. Furthermore, we used hierarchical clustering and K-means unsupervised algorithms to cluster consumers. The results show that respondents of this research can be clustered in nine different groups based on behavior regarding demographic attributes. It means that distinctive strategies can be used for different clusters. Meanwhile, marketing managers can provide different options, products and services for each group. This study is of high importance in that it has adopted and used plspm and Matrixpls packages in R to show the model predictive power. Meanwhile, we used unsupervised machine learning algorithms to cluster consumer behaviors.

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are often the driving force driving the economy of the countries, however, are not always fully exploit its innovative and creative capacity because many of these companies do not know the tools for today gives us the technology, worse the benefits we provide social networks. The aim of this article is intended to discuss best practices in the use of social networks as strategic marketing communication in SMEs. The methodology used in the research is based on the analysis of the state of science, exploratory study on the use of social networks and case studies of success. As a result there are two contributions to the enrichment of scientific literature on the subject: i) identification of best practices in the use of social networks and, ii) social networking as a marketing strategy for SMEs.

We discuss the use of social networks in implementing viral marketing strategies. While influence maximization has been studied in this context (see Chapter 24 of [10]), we study revenue maximization, arguably, a more natural objective. In our model, a buyer's decision to buy an item is influenced by the set of other buyers that own the item and the price at which the item is offered.

Social Network Marketing techniques employ pre-existing social networks to increase brands or products awareness through word-of-mouth promotion. Full understanding of social network marketing and the potential candidates that can thus be marketed to certainly offer lucrative opportunities for prospective sellers. Due to the complexity of social networks, few models exist to interpret social network marketing realistically. We propose to model social network marketing using Heat Diffusion Processes. This paper presents three diffusion models, along with three algorithms for selecting the best individuals to receive marketing samples. These approaches have the following advantages to best illustrate the properties of real-world social networks: (1) We can plan a marketing strategy sequentially in time since we include a time factor in the simulation of product adoptions; (2) The algorithm of selecting marketing candidates best represents and utilizes the clustering property of real-world social networks; and (3) The model we construct can diffuse both positive and negative comments on products or brands in order to simulate the complicated communications within social networks. Our work represents a novel approach to the analysis of social network marketing, and is the first work to propose how to defend against negative comments within social networks. Complexity analysis shows our model is also scalable to very large social networks.

Social networks have been extensively studied in business-to-consumer (B2C) studies, but their effects in a business-to-business (B2B) marketing context are under-theorized. The study develops an integrated social network marketing metric (SNMM) for B2B small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Using the framework, the study establishes a theoretical link between behavioral reasoning theory (BRT) and marketing accountability theory (MAT). Data was collected from 254 B2B SME marketers in India through a structured questionnaire survey and semi-structured interviews. At first glance, the missing link between SME performance and SNMM appears to be time, knowledge, and financial resources. SMEs that embrace innovation, proactiveness, and risk-taking can benefit from social media technologies. Thus, social networking has a direct, positive effect on SME growth. The implications for B2B SMEs’ SNMM studies are also discussed. Furthermore, the rationality of B2B marketing metrics has a tremendous influence on business success. Although the study has found a positive impact of SNMM on B2B SMEs success, further research is needed.

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article Share on Knowledge-sharing and influence in online social networks via viral marketing Authors: Mani R. Subramani University of Minnesota in Minneapolis University of Minnesota in MinneapolisView Profile , Balaji Rajagopalan Oakland University, Rochester, MI Oakland University, Rochester, MIView Profile Authors Info & Claims Communications of the ACMVolume 46Issue 12December 2003 pp 300–307https://doi.org/10.1145/953460.953514Online:01 December 2003Publication History 229citation14,430DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations229Total Downloads14,430Last 12 Months442Last 6 weeks35 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my Alerts New Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

Viral marketing is a form of peer-to-peer communication in which individuals are encouraged to pass on promotional messages within their social networks. Conventional wisdom holds that the viral marketing process is both random and unmanageable. In this paper, we deconstruct the process and investigate the formation of the activated digital network as distinct from the underlying social network. We then consider the impact of the social structure of digital networks (random, scale free, and small world) and of the transmission behavior of individuals on campaign performance. Specifically, we identify alternative social network models to understand the mediating effects of the social structures of these models on viral marketing campaigns. Next, we analyse an actual viral marketing campaign and use the empirical data to develop and validate a computer simulation model for viral marketing. Finally, we conduct a number of simulation experiments to predict the spread of a viral message within different types of social network structures under different assumptions and scenarios. Our findings confirm that the social structure of digital networks play a critical role in the spread of a viral message. Managers seeking to optimize campaign performance should give consideration to these findings before designing and implementing viral marketing campaigns. We also demonstrate how a simulation model is used to quantify the impact of campaign management inputs and how these learnings can support managerial decision making.

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Purpose Direct marketing faces challenges and opportunities associated with the emergence of social network media. Companies need to address target audiences both directly and also indirectly through social media. The purpose of this paper is to provide a review of the changing media landscape of direct marketing, and proposes a model of direct and indirect targeting of buyers. Design/methodology/approach A conceptual model is presented which brings together the needs of producers, sellers and communities. Customer experience is used as an integrative framework for reconciling the sometimes differing needs of these groups. Findings The literature is reviewed, noting changes in media habits. Previous studies of social network users provide a picture of the benefits sought by members of online communities. Originality/value Assessment of direct marketing has traditionally emphasised cognitive and behavioural metrics. This paper has proposed an experiential framework which may be more difficult to measure, but evidence is presented that emotions associated with use of social network web sites may be more important as a key success factor for direct marketing.

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This paper aims to investigate how social network marketing affects consumers' sustainable purchase behavior (CSPB) while considering the role of Eco-friendly attitude. The statistical population of the study included Iranian users of online social networks with at least one online purchasing experience. An online questionnaire was distributed on Instagram, Telegram, and WhatsApp platforms as the most popular networks in the country. By use of convenience sampling, commonly used in quantitative studies to overcome bias, 450 out of 475 returned questionnaires were acceptable, showing a response rate of 94.7%. The results indicated that an increase in Eco-friendly attitude positively increases the effect of word of mouth on consumers' sustainable purchase behavior. Meanwhile, Necessary Condition Analysis (NCA) revealed that to reach a 50% level of consumers' sustainable purchase behavior, six essential necessary conditions are required: an eco-friendly consumers' attitude at no less than 50%, the trend at no less than 57.1%, word of mouth at no less than 45.5%, interaction at no less than 42.9%, customization at no less than 35.3% and entertainment at no less than 26.7%. Furthermore, the Importance-Performance Matrix Analysis (IPMA) was investigated as a strategic tool. The results of IPMA showed that "buy products that use biodegradable material in packaging", "buy those products that are picked up and recycled", and "buy biodegradable products even if they belong to a less well-known company" show desirable performance and high importance and there is a great opportunity for expansion in this area.

The main objective of this study is to explore and investigate the impact of social network marketing on purchase intention of female's consumers in fashion apparel and how it is affected by mediating role of brand engagement and consumer motivation. Deductive approach is used to determine the variables influencing purchase intention of female fashion apparel's consumer. The study is conducted in Karachi, the hub of Pakistan's economy. A total 150 questionnaires were distributed using random sampling technique among females of Karachi, out of which 127 responded. Data is analyzed using mean, frequencies and standard deviation with the help of SPSS. The study reports that social network marketing was significantly associated with consumer purchase intention. The study further reveals that brand engagement and customer motivation act as a partial mediator on how social network marketing impact on purchase intention of females' fashion apparels.

Purpose The technology evolution compels retail networks to introduce unique business models to retain customers and to gain a competitive advantage. Customer reviews available through social media need to be taken into account by retail networks to design a model with unique service operations and marketing approaches that will improve loyalty by adding value to customers. Furthermore, the relationship between customer satisfaction and customer spending behaviour is very weak and needs further investigation. Hence the purpose of this paper is to understand how retail network leverage the potential of social media reviews along with unique service operations to satisfy customers. The study analyses the nexus of: a brand, promotional offers, service operations; and their interaction through social media reviews on customer satisfaction levels. Design/methodology/approach The authors develop a conceptual model for the social media era. The authors combine the idea of loyalty- and value-based models of Chatterjee (2013). The authors employed a survey questionnaire method to elicit opinions of retail customer satisfaction based on social media reviews, service operations and marketing efforts. The authors derive measures of the model from existing literature and expert opinion. Findings Social media reviews dramatically impact upon customer satisfaction. Similarly the empirical analysis identifies the significant and positive role played by service operations in customer satisfaction levels. Interestingly the authors did not find unequivocal support for brand satisfaction impacting on customer satisfaction. However, when promotions interact well with service operations, the level of customer satisfaction is significantly affected. Similarly the authors did not observe a positive outcome when there is an interaction between promotion and social media reviews. After reading the reviews, some potential buyers make a visit to store before making final decisions and surprisingly, promotional effects do not change their mind set. Practical implications Research findings confirm the importance of social media reviews, marketing and interaction between promotion and service operations enabling retail networks to build loyalty and value-based models. Based on customer behaviour, the study suggests a need to consider operational efficiencies when promoting sales; through careful planning, customer satisfaction and profitability levels can be increased. This sends a strong message to the retail network to defend their position within a very competitive business market. Originality/value The empirical evidence based on customer experience would be helpful for companies in integrating their operations and marketing efforts enabling them to convert different segment of customers such as “free riders (higher satisfaction and low profitability)” and “vulnerable customers (low satisfaction and higher profitability)” into “star customers (higher satisfaction and high profitability)”. Through a considered approach: combining social media reviews, marketing and operations, businesses will be better-placed to survive in the ultra-competitive social media-influenced era.

The explosion of Internet usage has drawn the attention of researchers towards online Social Networks Marketing (SNM). Research has shown that a number of the Internet users are distrustful and indecisive, when it comes to the use of social networks marketing system. Therefore, there is a need for researchers to identify some of the factors that determine users’ acceptance of social networks marketing using Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). This study extended the Technology Acceptance Model theoretical framework to predict consumer acceptance of social networks marketing within Western Cape Province of South Africa. The research model was tested using data collected from 470 questionnaires and analysed using linear regression. The results showed that user intentions to use SNM are strongly and positively correlated with user acceptance of using SNM systems. Empirical results confirmed that perceived credibility and perceived usefulness are the strongest determinant in predicting user intentions to use SNM system.

Given the mediating role of value co-creation, this paper tries to demonstrate how social network marketing (SNM) could influence consumer purchase behavior (CPB). The proposed hypotheses are empirically tested in this study using a PLS-SEM and Necessary Condition Analysis (NCA) method combination. The novel methodology adopted in this study includes the use of NCA, IPMA matrix, permutation test, CTA, and FIMIX. The assessment of the outer model, the inner model, the NCA matrix, and the IPMA matrix are the four steps that the paper takes. Instagram users with prior experience making purchases online made up the statistical population of the study. Four hundred twenty-seven questionnaires were analyzed by SmartPLS3 software. Based on the findings, SNM positively and significantly influenced economic, enjoyment, and relational values. Furthermore, these three types of values significantly and directly influenced CPB. For CPB, the model accounted for 73.8% of the variance. The model had high predictive power because it outperformed the PLS-SEM benchmark for all of the target construct’s indicators in terms of root mean square error (RMSE). According to the NCA’s findings, SNM, economic, recreational, and relational values are necessary conditions for CPB that are meaningful (d ≥ 0.1) and significant (p &lt; 0.05). Four prerequisites must be met for CPB to reach a 50% level: relational value at no less than 8.3%, enjoyment value at no less than 16.7%, economic value at no less than 33.3%, and SNM at no less than 31.1%. The highest importance score for SNM is shown to be 0.738, which means that if Instagram channels improve their SNM performance by one unit point, their overall SNM will also improve by 0.738.

Competition that is getting more competitive in smartphone industry has made customers feel quite difficult in deciding which product the customers should buy. This is because companies are doing marketing through mass media, both offline and online. Companies are trying to change customers’ way of thinking through emotion, need, want, and demand. Nowadays, in this globalization the traditional retailers are facing big challenge because young generation is starting to switch to online shopping. This fact poses as threat for traditional retailers, but can also be used as opportunity due to easy access to product and brand via social media. Therefore, this research objective was to find what the influences of social network marketing and electronic word of mouth (independent variables) toward customer purchase intention (dependent variable). Quantitative research was chosen as the method of this research. The population was smartphone users from 26 – 50 years old in Jakarta. Non – sampling method, specifically convenience sampling was used because this method allowed researched to approach random respondent easily. The researcher used 166 questionnaires as sample size. 166 valid data were analysed with Structural Equation Modelling to test hypothesises in the research. There are two hypothesises tested on this research. Based on analysis, all hypothesises are supported. In conclusion, the most significant value is Social Network Marketing (SNM) which contributed 35.3% toward purchase intention. Based on findings, it is suggested for the company to pay more attention in marketing activities at social media by giving positive experience to customers so that the customers can give positive feedback in social media as reference for future customers.

Purpose This paper aims to outlines the power of social networking that companies in Fiji could use as the twenty‐first century media tool to facilitate marketing activities and reach out to customers more than ever before. Design/methodology/approach The approach of the paper is generally conceptual, linking social networking to organizations, marketing activities and communications. Findings Social networking sites such as face book has become an essential modern media channel to position firms and its brands in the market and facilitate marketing activities and communication strategies. Social media networks with its unsurpassed reach and coverage capabilities have become one of the most powerful sources of socialized media to connect people. Originality/value The paper presents the arguments in a condensed and easy‐to‐digest format.

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Purpose Innovations, coupled with the advancement of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) and the evolution of the internet, have had a profound impact on the structure of firms and have altered the decision‐making process. In the new economic and social environment, the understanding of the developments and transformations undergone by ICTs with the advancement of social networks and Web 3.0 technology is vital because of the influence of recent innovations in the competitiveness of organizations. The aim of this paper is to achieve an in‐depth understanding of the new environment that has emerged with these developments. Design/methodology/approach The study focuses on the use of social networks and the conception of the corresponding new business models, highlighting the importance of community managers and crowdsourcing processes. Findings The paper explores the possible sources of competitive advantages open to organizations in the light of recent innovations, and highlights the developments that they should implement to improve the decision management process and exploit new situations. Practical implications The paper analyzes the impact of social networks and Web 3.0 technology in the management and marketing of organizations, highlighting certain mechanisms to improve competitive advantages for organizations. Originality/value The impact of social networks and Web 3.0 technology on organizations has not been analyzed in the literature. The paper also highlights the importance of community managers and crowdsourcing processes in coping with the new environment.

This study investigates the effect of online and offline pre-purchase influences and the role of fashion brand involvement and online brand engagement in predicting purchase intention of products marketed in social media. A four-construct structural model was developed and validated on a sample of 799 shoppers in North America. Partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was used to test the model. All six hypotheses were supported and fashion brand involvement was identified as a mediator. The analysis incorporated an advanced segmentation technique, Partial Least Squares Prediction Oriented Segmentation, (PLS-POS). Two groups of similar size emerged with differences that are of theoretical and managerial interest. Expansion of the model and future testing in different contexts will help to refine and develop it, providing insights into social media marketing.

Models for the processes by which ideas and influence propagate through a social network have been studied in a number of domains, including the diffusion of medical and technological innovations, the sudden and widespread adoption of various strategies in game-theoretic settings, and the effects of "word of mouth" in the promotion of new products. Recently, motivated by the design of viral marketing strategies, Domingos and Richardson posed a fundamental algorithmic problem for such social network processes: if we can try to convince a subset of individuals to adopt a new product or innovation, and the goal is to trigger a large cascade of further adoptions, which set of individuals should we target?We consider this problem in several of the most widely studied models in social network analysis. The optimization problem of selecting the most influential nodes is NP-hard here, and we provide the first provable approximation guarantees for efficient algorithms. Using an analysis framework based on submodular functions, we show that a natural greedy strategy obtains a solution that is provably within 63% of optimal for several classes of models; our framework suggests a general approach for reasoning about the performance guarantees of algorithms for these types of influence problems in social networks.We also provide computational experiments on large collaboration networks, showing that in addition to their provable guarantees, our approximation algorithms significantly out-perform node-selection heuristics based on the well-studied notions of degree centrality and distance centrality from the field of social networks.

The article takles ICT impact on entrepreneurship by putting emphasis on theoretical aspects of social network, social network marketing and social marketing strategy. The social network has opened a whole New World of opportunity for even the smallest homebased business owner. There are countless numbers of new self-made millionaires that achieved their newfound success on the Internet. They started their Internet businesses from the scratches, found a niche and built their success. Developing a successful social network marketing strategy is an essential part of online successs and one of preconditions of successful entrepreneurship. In order to succeed, you must develop and implement a strategic plan that includes all of the following constituents: a great product, a website specifically designed to sell, a good marketing strategy. The paper provides overview of contemporary practices of suggest generalizations.

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Alcohol consumption and heavy drinking in young adults have been key concerns for public health. Alcohol marketing is an important factor in contributing to negative outcomes. The rapid growth in the use of new social networking technologies raises new issues regarding alcohol marketing, as well as potential impacts on alcohol cultures more generally. Young people, for example, routinely tell and re-tell drinking stories online, share images depicting drinking, and are exposed to often intensive and novel forms of alcohol marketing. In this paper, we critically review the research literature on (a) social networking technologies and alcohol marketing and (b) online alcohol content on social networks, and then consider implications for public health knowledge and research. We conclude that social networking systems are positive and pleasurable for young people, but are likely to contribute to pro-alcohol environments and encourage drinking. However, currently research is preliminary and descriptive, and we need innovative methods and detailed in-depth studies to gain greater understanding of young people's mediated drinking cultures and commercial alcohol promotion.

Explosive growth in the number of users on various social media platforms has transformed the way firms strategize their marketing activities. To take advantage of the vast size of social networks, firms have now turned their attention to influencer marketing wherein they employ independent influencers to promote their products on social media platforms. Despite the recent growth in influencer marketing, the problem of network seeding (i.e., identification of influencers to optimally post a firm’s message or advertisement) neither has been rigorously studied in the academic literature nor has been carefully addressed in practice. We develop a data-driven optimization framework to help a firm successfully conduct (i) short-horizon and (ii) long-horizon influencer marketing campaigns, for which two models are developed, respectively, to maximize the firm’s benefit. The models are based on the interactions with marketers, observation of firms’ message placements on social media, and model parameters estimated via empirical analysis performed on data from Twitter. Our empirical analysis discovers the effects of collective influence of multiple influencers and finds two important parameters to be included in the models, namely, multiple exposure effect and forgetting effect. For the short-horizon campaign, we develop an optimization model to select influencers and present structural properties for the model. Using these properties, we develop a mathematical programming based polynomial time procedure to provide near-optimal solutions. For the long-horizon problem, we develop an efficient solution procedure to simultaneously select influencers and schedule their message postings over a planning horizon. We demonstrate the superiority of our solution strategies for both short- and long-horizon problems against multiple benchmark methods used in practice. Finally, we present several managerially relevant insights for firms in the influencer marketing context. This paper was accepted by J. George Shanthikumar, big data analytics.

The purpose of this article is to analyze the impact of social interactions on marketing interactions within social networks (SN). We propose and test a structural model of relationships embracing the following constructs: Social Relationships, Trust, Information Disclosure, Word of Mouth (WOM) and Attitude toward Advertising. Data were gathered through the application of a structured questionnaire to a sample of 150 university students. The results validate the proposed model and support five out of seven hypotheses. The findings evidence that Social Relationships are significant predictors of Information Disclosure, WOM and Attitude toward Advertising. Similarly, Trust acts as a predictor of Information Disclosure and WOM. Overall, social interactions have a positive and significant impact on marketing interactions.

Abstract This study focused on modelling the use of social network marketing in Indonesia. This platform was currently widely used as a means of trading among sellers and buyers so that they did not have to go to many stores to get their necessities. However, several studies showed that there was still a lack of trust, causing buyers to be reluctant to use the platform. Thereby, the objective of this study was to investigate what factors contribute to their reluctancy to use the platform. Therefore, a quantitative methodology was applied to model the use of social network marketing using PLS-SEM (Partial Least Square Structural Equation Modelling). After conducting purposive questionnaires to about 250 various buyers in Jakarta, Smart PLS was run to get a robust and accurate model (Goodness of Fit = 0.72). The result indicates that 1) Behavioural Intention is effected mainly by Perceived Usefulness (r=0.80), Awareness (r=0.67), Perceived Ease of Use (r=0.63), and Perceived Credibility (r=0.37), 2) Perceived Usefulness is effected mainly by Perceived Ease of Use (r=0.78) and Computer Self-Efficacy (r=0,56), 3) Perceived Ease of Use is effected by Computer Self-Efficacy (r=0.61), 4) Perceived Credibility (PC) is effected by Awareness (r=0.44) and Computer Self-Efficacy (r=0.28), and 5) Awareness is effected by Computer Self-Efficacy (r=0.32). Therefore, the implication of this study indicates that in order to promote the behavioral intention of buyers, sellers should mainly promote the perceived ease of use of their platforms and their buyers’ computer self-efficacy, followed by other remaining factors.

In the past few years, expenditure on influencer marketing has grown exponentially. The present study involves preliminary research to understand the mechanism by which influencer marketing affects consumers via social media. It proposes an integrated model—the social media influencer value model—to account for the roles of advertising value and source credibility. To test this model, we administered an online survey among social media users who followed at least one influencer. Partial least squares (PLS) path modeling results show that the informative value of influencer-generated content, influencer’s trustworthiness, attractiveness, and similarity to the followers positively affect followers’ trust in influencers’ branded posts, which subsequently influence brand awareness and purchase intentions. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to test the effects of two types of celebrities (Instagram celebrity vs traditional celebrity) on source trustworthiness, brand attitude, envy and social presence. The proposed theoretical model consists of the celebrity type as the independent variable, social presence as the mediator and self-discrepancy as the moderator. Design/methodology/approach A randomized two-group comparison (Instagram celebrity vs traditional celebrity) between-subjects experiment ( n =104) was conducted. Findings The results indicate that consumers exposed to Instagram celebrity’s brand posts perceive the source to be more trustworthy, show more positive attitude toward the endorsed brand, feel stronger social presence and feel more envious of the source than those consumers exposed to traditional celebrity’s brand posts. Structural equation modeling (Mplus 8.0) and bootstrap confidence intervals indicate that social presence mediates the causal effects of celebrity type on trustworthiness, brand attitude and envy. Multiple regression analyses reveal the moderating effects of appearance-related actual–ideal self-discrepancy. Practical implications Ultimately, managerial implications for social media marketing and Instagram influencer-based branding are provided. From the perspective of marketing planning, the findings speak to the power of influencer marketing as an effective branding strategy. Originality/value The paper discusses theoretical implications for the marketing literature on celebrity endorsements.

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Influencer marketing initiatives require firms to select and incentivize online influencers to engage their followers on social media in an attempt to promote the firms’ offerings. However, limited research considers the costs of influencer marketing when evaluating these campaigns’ effectiveness, particularly from an engagement elasticity perspective. Moreover, it is unclear whether and how marketers could enhance influencer marketing effectiveness by strategically selecting influencers, targeting their followers, or managing content. This study draws on a communication model to examine how factors related to the sender of a message (influencer), the receiver of the message (influencer's followers), and the message itself (influencer's posts) determine influencer marketing effectiveness. The findings show that influencer originality, follower size, and sponsor salience enhance effectiveness, and posts that announce new product launches diminish it. Several tensions arise when firms select influencers and manage content: Influencer activity, follower–brand fit, and post positivity all exert inverted U-shaped moderating effects on influencer marketing effectiveness, suggesting that firms that adopt a balanced approach along these dimensions can achieve greater effectiveness. These novel insights offer important implications for marketers designing influencer marketing campaigns.

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The rise of influencer marketing makes YouTube an ideal media platform to implement such marketing strategies. Many scholars consider the success of YouTube influencer marketing as a result of high consumer perception of information credibility. This study employs heuristic-systematic model to investigate how informational cues influence credibility evaluations of information posted by YouTube influencers. An online survey was conducted to investigate the factors, and a two-step, structural equation modelling data analysis approach was utilised to explore the correlation between variables. The results reveal that trustworthiness, social influence, argument quality, and information involvement are influential factors affecting consumer perceived information credibility on YouTube. The analytic results also reveal a strong and positive correlation between perceived information credibility and brand/video attitudes.

Influencer marketing represents a $10 billion industry in 2020 and is becoming of increasing relevance for many firms, especially those operating in a business-to-consumer environment. Few firms in the fashion, beauty, travel, food, or beverage industries are running marketing campaigns these days that do not include, at least to some share, a collaboration with popular users on platforms such as Instagram and TikTok. However, many marketing managers still have a less than adequate understanding of those platforms compared with their knowledge of more traditional media channels and often find it hard to make the right decision in this fast-moving environment. To provide some guidance in this respect, this article aims to give an introduction to the most critical platforms for influencer marketing. It then presents advice to firms who want to engage in influencer marketing as well as specific questions on identifying the right influencers to collaborate with.

Influencer marketing appears to be an effective and cost-efficient marketing tool, as it is often not perceived by consumers as advertising and guarantees a wide reach to very engaged audiences. Many businesses harness social media influencers to promote their brands to target audiences. However, influencer marketing has mainly been adopted through a process of trial and error without in-depth insight into how social media influencers should be used strategically as a distinct tool in the marketing mix. In recent years, academic research on influencer marketing has been growing rapidly and offers a deeper insight into how influencer marketing affects customers. The current article deploys bibliometric and thematic content analyses to provide an overview of the current influencer marketing research and identifies the leading journals, authors, publications, and main research themes in this domain. The article concludes with recommendations for future research and businesses when employing influencer marketing.

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This study examines the moderating role of audience comments in influencer marketing. A YouTube vlog entry by a social media influencer featuring the endorsement of a brand was studied, and an experimental design featuring two conditions related to audience comments was created. The results indicate that a parasocial relationship with the influencer builds the perceived credibility of the influencer, while comments by other audience members moderate the effect. Influencer credibility positively affects brand trust and purchase intention. The findings enhance the understanding of the role of an active audience in influencer marketing.

As digital and social media continue to grow in terms of usage and advertising expenditures, the advertising industry has been forced to develop innovative strategies. One such strategy is influencer marketing, which connects online personas with brands or services that target audiences trust and engage with regularly. This study provides insight into the experiences with and perceptions of influencer marketing among those working in advertising agencies. Nineteen U.S. advertising agency professionals were interviewed. Results show that the billion-dollar influencer marketing industry is largely uncharted territory that impacts strategic decision making and requires a shift in agency process for effective implementation.

Influencer Marketing is the most important new approach to marketing in a decade for those professionals at the leading edge of purchasing decision making. It shows that key decision makers in all major markets operate within communities of influencers- because major decisions are too complex and risky to taken in isolation. The ‘ecosystems’ this creates are full of these critically important people, whose impact on purchasing decisions is both pivotal and misunderstood. This new book demonstrates that-• As mass media impact wanes so the role of influencers grows - marketers need to know why and how to use this knowledge• The impact of blogs, wikis and other social media is that they enable new influencers to emerge, and disperse traditional sources of influence.• Large and small businesses worldwide pour billions of pounds each year into influencing what they think are their influencers. This book shows you that most of that money is being spent on the wrong people, leaving the real influencers all too often untouched.• Influencers do not do the buying, are not obvious, cannot be bought, and start off neutral - which is why their potential to affect sales is so great• Influencers are not all equal - they can be assessed, ranked and prioritised to be used effectively• Influencers can be influenced – the question is how to get to them to generate market awareness, leads and address sales barriersInfluencer marketing is closely related to the relentless rise and success of word of mouth (WOM) and relationship marketing, and is now established as one of the armoury of new techniques professionals must use. For all those involved in marketing and sales this book will be an essential analysis of how to identify who has influence, how they apply it, and how you can turn it to your advantage.

Purpose This paper aims to examine how consumers respond to social media influencers that are created through artificial intelligence (AI) and compares effects to traditional (human) influencers. Design/methodology/approach Across two empirical studies, the authors examine the efficacy of AI social media influencers. With Study 1, the authors establish baseline effects for AI influencers and investigate how social-psychological distance impacts consumer perceptions. The authors also investigate the role of an influencer’s agency – being autonomous or externally managed – to test the boundaries of the results and determine the interactive effects between influencer type and influencer agency. Study 2 acts as an extension and validation of Study 1, whereby the authors provide generalisability and overlay the role of need for uniqueness as a moderated mediator. Findings The authors show that there are similarities and differences in the ways in which consumers view AI and human influencers. Importantly, the authors find no difference in terms of intention to follow or personalisation. This suggests that consumers are equally open to follow an AI or human influencer, and they perceive the level of personalisation provided by either influencer type as similar. Furthermore, while an AI influencer is generally perceived as having lower source trust, they are more likely to evoke word-of-mouth intentions. In understanding these effects, the authors show that social distance mediates the relationship between influencer type and the outcomes the authors investigate. Results also show that AI influencers can have a greater effect on consumers who have a high need for uniqueness. Finally, the authors find that a lack of influencer agency has a detrimental effect. Research limitations/implications The studies investigate consumers’ general response to AI influencers within the context of Instagram, however, future research might examine consumers’ response to posts promoting specific products across a variety of category contexts and within different social media platforms. Practical implications The authors find that in some ways, an AI influencer can be as effective as a human influencer. Indeed, the authors suggest that there may be a spill-over effect from consumer experiences with other AI recommendation systems, meaning that consumers are open to AI influencer recommendations. However, the authors find consistent evidence that AI influencers are trusted less than traditional influencers, hence the authors caution brands from rushing to replace human influencers with their AI counterparts. Originality/value This paper offers novel insight into the increasingly prominent phenomenon of the AI influencer. Specifically, it takes initial steps towards developing understanding as to how consumers respond to AI influencers and contrast these effects with human influencers.

Influencer marketing actions are mostly carried out on social platforms, e.g., Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. However, despite its increasing use, studies on this subject are still scarce. In this research, we focus on four essential factors related to an influencer marketing programme, analyzed in two separate experimental studies for theoretical reasons and methodological operability: brand control over the shared message and its commercial orientation; and, the celebrity level of the influencer and his/her congruence with the product/service they comment on in the post. We are also interested in the effects of these factors on a set of key responses by the follower with regard to the elements that form part of an influencer marketing action: the influencer, the post, and the product/service.

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Popular social media influencer promotion of food affects children's food intake. Influencer marketing of unhealthy foods increased children's immediate food intake, whereas the equivalent marketing of healthy foods had no effect. Increasing the promotion of healthy foods on social media may not be an effective strategy to encourage healthy dietary behaviors in children. More research is needed to understand the impact of digital food marketing and inform appropriate policy action.

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Recent marketing trends indicate the rise of influencers as an extension of word of mouth campaigns. As consumers turn to social media platforms, organizations are realizing the power of influencers in affecting a purchase decision. The current study throws light on various aspects of influencer marketing that drive consumer behavior by using the theory of planned behavior (henceforth referred to as TPB) ( Ajzen, 1991 ) and social learning theory by Bandura and Walters (1963) as part of the qualitative research to identify key factors of influencer marketing that impact consumer behavior. The study revealed that both attitude toward influencers and perceived behavior control that allows increase in domain knowledge had a favorable impact on consumer behavior while the influence of peers had no effect. Further additional constructs namely personal relevance, inspiration, and trust had a positive impact on behavior while perceived risk did not have any effect. Product influencer fitment was an important criterion for consumers, as they followed the specific type of influencers for different product categories. Depending on the posts shared by influencers, consumers are impacted at four levels: increase in brand awareness, subject matter expertise, brand preference, and preference. Successful influencer marketing involves identifying the right type of influencer who will offer curated advice, stories, and suggestions to create engagement with the audience.

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A new digital marketing tool that has emerged today is that of social media influencer marketing. Social media influencers are those individuals who shape consumers’ perceptions regarding a brand or product through photos, videos and other updates on social media platforms. This research paper is an attempt to identify the effect of various attributes of social media influencers on their credibility and eventually on purchase intention of consumers in Delhi NCR, India. An online questionnaire was used to collect data through Google Forms and the size of the sample was 76. Quota sampling technique was used, and structural equation modeling through SmartPLS 3 was used for data analysis. The findings reveal that trustworthiness, information quality and entertainment value have significant direct effects on the credibility of influencers as well as significant indirect effects on the purchase intention of consumers. Also, the purchase intention of consumers is directly affected by an influencer’s trustworthiness and credibility.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize virtual influencer marketing, outlining the opportunities and dangers associated with using virtual influencers in social media marketing communications. Design/methodology/approach Drawing on the literature addressing influencer marketing and interactions between consumers and technologies, this paper introduces the landscape of virtual influencer marketing. Findings This paper distinguishes virtual influencers from real-life influencers and related digital characters. It further defines four unique elements attributed to virtual influencers: customization, flexibility, ownership and automation. Finally, it introduces a taxonomy for virtual influencers. Research limitations/implications The conceptualization of virtual influencer marketing contributes to advancing the understanding of the (virtual) influencer marketing landscape. Practical implications This paper suggests that brands need to carefully evaluate the different characteristics of virtual influencers, when deciding to leverage them in social media marketing communications. It also provides guidelines for working with virtual influencers in marketing campaigns targeted at consumers. Social implications This paper discusses ethical and social implications for brands and consumers that interact with virtual influencers in the encounter between reality and virtuality. Originality/value This paper makes three contributions. First, it conceptualizes virtual influencer marketing by defining and critically evaluating the key characteristics attributed to virtual influencers. Second, it offers a 2 × 2 taxonomy of virtual influencers, grounded in research on anthropomorphism and reality–virtuality. Third, this paper reflects on the opportunities and dangers associated with virtual influencer marketing, outlining avenues for future research.

This paper focuses on consumer electronics products and observes the comparative effect of celebrity vis-à-vis expert influencers on consumers' online purchase intentions. The mediating role played by brand admiration and brand attitude between influencer marketing and online purchase intentions are tested. The moderating role played by message involvement between influencer marketing and brand attitude is also observed. The survey method was employed to conduct this research, and data were collected from 438 respondents. The proposed hypotheses were tested using structural equation modeling, hierarchical regression analysis, and Hayes process method. The results submit that there is a definite advantage in choosing an expert influencer over an attractive celebrity influencer while planning the marketing communications of consumer electronics products. The mediating role of brand attitude and brand admiration is empirically evident. The moderating effect of involvement is also established.

Influencer marketing in travel and tourism builds on the importance of word-of-mouth in the travel context. Tourism marketers started working with bloggers early on as blogs quickly became important information sources for travel decision makers and therefore valuable media for marketers. Inkybee describes influencer marketing as involving influencer discovery, influencer outreach, design of influencer campaigns, influencer tracking/measurement and influencer relations. Krasniak lists ongoing brand ambassadorship, product reviews, brand mentions, event coverage, sponsored content and affiliate links as the most important and effective influencer marketing tactics currently used by marketers. In practice, influencer marketing takes many forms beyond getting the influencer to spread a marketing message. Travel marketers have recognized the great potential of message amplification and targeting afforded by travel social media influencers. The promise of travel perks as well as the ability to associate one's personal brand with desirable travel and tourism brands makes travel and tourism an attractive target industry for influencers.

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Purpose Social media, especially social media-based influencer marketing, has become an important factor in consumer decision-making. Studies have recently begun investigating how influencers affect consumer behaviour. Despite the increasing interest, the purpose of this study is to examine influencers’ evaluation impact on consumer behaviour are scarce. Design/methodology/approach An online study undertook research to gain further understanding. Specifically, the study examines the following: firstly, the impact of consumers’ perceived influencer credibility (IC), using the source credibility model in respect of purchase intention, attitude towards advertising and product; secondly, the impact of the organizational behaviour concept psychological ownership (PO) on consumer behaviour by showing that the concept has significant positive effects on attitude towards the product and purchase intention like in prior research; thirdly, the perceived connection and relationship between the influencer and consumer to understand the relations. Findings The results show that perceived IC serves as a significant criterion, determining purchase intention, attitude towards advertising and product, while contributing an instrument for transferring convincing messages, which increase the perceived connection to the influencer and the PO feeling for a product and, thus, influence consumer behaviour positively. Originality/value Theories on source credibility and a connection to the PO concept allowed to develop a framework to assess the importance of IC and its influence on consumers’ perception of the products that influencers advertise to better understand the interactions in the influencer marketing context.

Purpose This research explores the path that social media influencers affect target consumers to purchase a certain brand posted in their contents. Design/methodology/approach Using a sample of 510 Weibo users in China, the conceptual model is tested by structural equation modeling (SEM) in Lisrel 8.8 statistical software. Findings This study examined that influencers' source characteristics stimulate consumers' positive attitudes (image satisfaction and/or advertising trust), in turn affect consumers' purchase intention. The expertise, originality and homophily of influencers positively affect two attitudes of consumers. The attractiveness only positively affects image satisfaction, and the interactivity only positively affects advertising trust. Besides that, this study also verified the mediating role of consumers' self-brand connection between the two attitudes and purchase intentions. Originality/value By distinguishing two different attitudes of consumers and incorporating consumers' self-brand connection, we proposed a complete theoretical framework for the overall mechanism of influence marketing based on communication–persuasion matrix.

Watching online videos is becoming an important part of children's media diets. Children particularly like content that is specifically created for YouTube by YouTube personalities. Because these personalities have a large reach and are considered likeable and credible, they have become social media influencers. For advertisers, these influencers are an interesting channel to reach youth. Therefore, influencers often embed persuasive sponsored messages in their videos to earn money. However, there are concerns about this practice because it is not always clear when a video includes advertising. Therefore, in several countries, guidelines have been developed that state that sponsoring in influencer videos should be disclosed as such. Until now, little is known about the effects of disclosures for influencer videos on children and the boundary conditions for such effects. Therefore, we investigated the effects of a disclosure of sponsored influencer videos on children's advertising literacy. Additionally, we examined the consequences of the disclosure for children's responses to the brand, advertised product, and video. We also included the para-social relationship (PSR) that children experience with an influencer as a possible boundary condition for disclosure effects on persuasion. Our experiment amongst children between 8 and 12 years old showed that, when children correctly recalled the disclosure, the disclosure increased their recognition of advertising, and understanding of selling and persuasive intent. Moreover, advertising literacy evoked by the disclosure affected persuasion: The disclosure enhanced brand memory through ad recognition, but also decreased advertised product desire through understanding the selling intent of the video. Furthermore, the PSR of children with the influencer proved to be a boundary condition for disclosure effects on brand attitudes. Only for those children who experienced moderate to low PSRs with the influencer, the disclosure resulted in less positive brand attitudes through understanding selling intent. For children who experienced a strong PSR with the influencer, the understanding that the content had a selling intent did not affect their brand attitudes. These findings show that a disclosure (if noticed and remembered) can be an effective tool to achieve transparency, but also influences the persuasive outcomes of influencer marketing in online videos.

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The role of the personality in the travelers’ decision-making was investigated, in relation to the usage of the content generated in social media. Based on the EBM decision-making model and the Big Five trait model of personality, the study examined travelers/social media users. In total, 582 questionnaires were collected and analyzed. Results revealed that personality influences all the travel decision-making phases. Additionally, the survey showed that user-generated-content influences travelers’ behavior more than marketing-generated-content. The findings have added significant contributions to the traveler’s decision-making theory, as well as to the marketing practices that should be implemented on social media.

Purpose The present research aims to examine selfie-marketing from a consumer behavior perspective. Creating and sharing selfies are gaining popularity among millennials. The authors seek to understand how this popularity relates to classic research on narcissism and self-concept and to determine the effectiveness of selfie-marketing in visual user-generated content. Design/methodology/approach A mixed methods approach is used across two studies. Study 1’s qualitative exploration uses the grounded theory method by analyzing semi-structured interviews with millennials. The findings produce three research propositions. These propositions are further developed into testable hypotheses in Study 2’s quantitative investigation, featuring analysis of the variance of online survey data collected from millennials. Findings The findings suggest that narcissism positively relates to millennials’ attitudes toward and intent to participate in selfie-marketing on visual content-sharing apps. Results also demonstrate that millennials seek to use selfies to present their self-concepts differently in various visual content-sharing environments. Originality/value The present research is among the first to focus on the importance of self-presentation and narcissism in regard to consumers’ attitudes and behavioral responses toward selfie-marketing. For marketers, this underscores the importance of understanding the unique nature of user-generated visual content on social media.

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Abstract The disruptive strength of digital technologies in healthcare has led to valuable changes in the search for information and the application of these technologies. The introduction of these technologies has altered, sometimes even inverting, the doctor–patient relationship. User‐generated content on social media and online communities represents a form of disruptive cooperation that has huge potential benefits for the future growth of society. Using netnographic analysis of smart patients and data from an online survey of Italian oncologists and health professionals, this paper shows the impact of user‐generated content on the pursuit of personal well‐being. The linkages between new forms of knowledge, business, and innovation are highlighted. Based on an analysis of the emerging concept of systems medicine, this paper focuses on the dimension of participation. A data‐driven approach is adopted, and the data, information, knowledge, and wisdom framework is used to explain how people employ user‐generated content in their pursuit of well‐being. Managerial perspectives and suggestions for future research developments are discussed.

Purpose The aim of this paper is twofold: to provide empirical evidence of the knowledge-sharing process within virtual communities interested in war heritage sites and to compare user-generated content (UGC) in virtual communities with destinations’ official communication about war heritage sites to identify, original and consumer-oriented narratives. Design/methodology/approach This study uses field research to investigate selected war heritage sites and to assess the destinations’ on-site communication; in-depth interviews to learn about the destination marketing organizations’ approaches to communication; and netnography with content analysis of text and pictures to evaluate the online knowledge shared within virtual communities on the investigated war heritage sites. A comparison between users-generated content and official destination management organizations’ (DMOs) communication was carried out. Findings The results show that the destinations under investigation have invested significantly to develop war heritage tourism, but they still struggle to attract tourists. The comparison between DMOs communication narratives and users-generated content shows that DMOs fail to use emotional involvement and accurate historic knowledge which seems to be at the basis of UGC narratives. Indeed, history passionates posts, pictures, comments and exchanges are emotionally engaging and DMOs could benefit from the user-generated content approach to improve institutional communication on war heritage sites. Research limitations/implications Further studies could survey history passionates, both online and offline, as to better explore the relationship between contributing to virtual communities’ content and visitation patterns of war heritage sites. Incorporating more emotionally engaging narratives, DMOs could enhance their communication and create virtual spaces where knowledgeable tourists can share information and experiences. Originality/value This paper contributes to the understanding of online knowledge sharing in the context of war heritage tourism. The comparison between UGC in virtual communities and official destinations’ narratives shows the potential of spontaneous knowledge sharing versus structured online communication and how the latter could benefit UGC.

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This thesis was written as part of a Double-Degree Masters program in Management, with focus in Marketing. Aligned with the nature of the degree, this study aims to be a useful tool for managers and marketers, which conduct business online. This thesis is a study of Content Marketing in the content of online commercial product pages. Its aim is to understand how to use content marketing to drive conversion, by understanding consumer attitudes and purchase intention towards content. A in-depth study of existing theories and exploratory primary research was developed in other to attain these objectives. Business-to-consumer electronic commerce (B2C e-commerce) has provided consumers and online retailers with a more effective medium to perform online transactions through commercial websites. Although consumers have realized that the benefits of online shopping; such as time saving, minimizing effort, convenience, broader selection, and wider access to information, they are still greatly unwilling to shop online. Consumers shop essentially for two motives, to meet experiential (fun) or goal-oriented (efficiency) needs (Wolfinbarger & Gilly, 2001). The information provided by content marketing seeks to focus on consumers need for information and entertainment, instead of focusing on the brand. Thus, it is expected that the type of content format will have different effects on the attitudes and purchase intention on the online shopper, depending on the online shopping purpose. Concretely, a goal-oriented shopper should find user generated content (UGC) to be more valuable content formats, since they decrease the amount of search effort. While on the other hand, videos & tutorials (VT) might be perceived as more valuable for a consumer looking to spend time and being entertained through online shopping. The exploratory research was characterized by a survey experiment with online consumers. Participants were exposed to stimuli of content marketing tested according to their attitudes and purchase intention. The focus was to understand the impact of two different content marketing tactics—User-generated content and Videos & Tutorials—on attitudes and purchase intentions and how they interact with content complexity. The results indicate that content marketing in commercial product pages is relevant in driving consumer attitudes and purchase intentions. Consumers are not motivated by a specific content marketing tactic, unless that content has a certain level of complexity. In that case, Ur-Generated Content becomes a relevant tactic in product pages, however VT is not.

This article is based on the idea that user generated content is of fundamental importance in tourism and travel industry to understand the role of consumer generated messages. This paper also describes interpersonal influences mean for user generated content and also word of mouth (WOM) which reflect cost effective for tourism and travel industry but as well as the real crisis lead by the customer and discusses the new technological and ethical considerations facing tourism and travel industry

This study examines how user-generated content on social media can act as a marketing research instrument in identifying consumer behaviour. The analysis was performed on a sample of 900 Instagram images containing the hashtag #thegoodlife and labeled the digital photos using a machine learning algorithm. The results highlight the visual representation of the clusters resulted using the K-mean method and practical managerial implications

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This study tests hypotheses regarding differences in brand-related user-generated content (UGC) between Twitter (a microblogging site), Facebook (a social network) and YouTube (a content community). It tests them using data from a content analysis of 600 UGC posts for two retail-apparel brands (Lululemon and American Apparel), which differ in the extent to which they manage social media proactively. Comparisons are drawn across six dimensions of UGC; the dimensions were drawn from a priori reading and an inductive analysis of brand-related UGC. This research provides a general framework for comparing brand-related UGC, and helps us to better understand how particular social media channels and marketing strategies may influence consumer-produced brand communications.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relative impact of brand communication on brand equity through social media as compared to traditional media. In a juxtaposition of different industries it aims at: investigating whether both communication instruments have an impact on consumer‐based brand equity; comparing the effect sizes of these two communication instruments; and separating the effects of firm‐created and user‐generated social media communication. Design/methodology/approach A total of 393 data sets from three different industries, namely tourism, telecommunications, and pharmaceuticals, were generated using a standardized online‐survey. Structural equation modeling was used in the analysis of the data obtained to investigate the interplay of social media and traditional media in general, as well as in an examination of industry‐specific differences. Findings The results of the empirical study show that both traditional communications and social media communications have a significant impact on brand equity. While traditional media has a stronger impact on brand awareness, social media communications strongly influence brand image. Firm‐created social media communication is shown to have an important impact on functional brand image, while user‐generated social media communication exerts a major influence on hedonic brand image. Furthermore, the present study highlights significant differences between the industries under investigation. Originality/value The research described in this paper is pioneering in that it juxtaposes the impacts of social media and traditional media on brand equity – a topic of increasing interest to firms in the era of Facebook and Twitter but so far largely uninvestigated. Moreover, the differentiation between firm‐created and user‐generated social media communication, which is gaining increasingly in importance, as companies see their brand marketing power devolve to the consumer through social media platforms, offers valuable insights to marketing practitioners and academics.

User-generated content (UGC) is the basis for information sharing and collaboration over the Internet and these Web 2.0 tools have changed the ways that travelers search for, view and evaluate travel information. In marketing terms, UGC sites are effectively a form of to consumer Consumer trust is a critical factor in marketing and for this reason, leveraging the thoughts, words, and images of real human being, with their permission, through user- generated content websites, can make brand, even tourism brand and destination, trustworthy. In this context, our paper focuses on the implications of travelers' use of these websites for the marketing of tourism services and destinations. First of all, a literature review was performed to illustrate the impact of UGC travel-related websites for tourism marketing. Then, a quantitative study was conducted for exploring consumers' views on UGC in relation to travel planning. The aim of this web-based survey was to investigate how UGC websites are being used by Romanian young people and the impact that these websites are having on the information search and travel behavior of the Romanian tourists. In the end, our paper explains the impact of user-generated content on the travel decision-making behavior of the Romanian travelers, provides recommendations on how the travel and tourism industry from Romania may respond to the UGC phenomena to effectively meet the needs of the tourists and proposes ways in which UGC features can be integrated into Romanian travel websites for promoting our country as a tourism destination.

Tourism is one of the sectors which has been more affected by the widespread use of information technologies, due to its link to entertainment and its highly dependence on information. Destination marketing organisations, or DMOs, dedicated to promoting tourism destinations, have used the advantages of information technologies in their websites during the last few years. Recently, a new paradigm, characterised by the use of applications and collaborative tools, which is called Web 2.0, is driving dramatic changes in the promotion of tourist destinations, with a clear shift towards the use of content generated by internet users, and hence, the creation of web-based communities regarding touristic activities around each destination. In this article, we will study and discuss how the major DMOs, according to their ‘popularity on the internet’, are improving their websites with specific tools in order to exploit the enormous potential of user generated content in web-based communities, characteristic of this new Web 2.0 scenario.

Social media has been recognized as an important marketing tool for affecting consumer behaviour, which motivated companies to search for opportunities to advertise their brands through social media. In that regard, they critically assess sponsoring user-generated-content (UGC) creators in social media to feature their products. However, the effectiveness of this approach on consumers’ decisions is still unclear, and the literature is scarce. This study assesses the impact of explicit sponsorship of social media UGC creators on consumers’ behaviour. The purpose is to examine the factors affecting viewer’s willingness to purchase a product through a social media channel, and understand whether a sponsored video changes the viewers’ opinion. The effects of UGC social media videos on consumers is investigated through a within-design experimental study. Multiple measurements are made on the same set of respondents, chosen among 241 females, for two YouTube videos, one self-produced and the other associated with a brand. Data is assessed by employing four analyses; mean comparison, moderation, multi-group moderation and moderated mediation. The study indicates that sponsorship of UGC creators on YouTube is an effective way of advertising brands, and strengthens the respondents’ purchase intention. Results showed that sponsorship increases the source’s perceived expertise. Although sponsorship decreases the endorser’s trustworthiness, the impact of a specific brand positively effects consumers’ willingness to buy, and word-of-mouth (WOM) intention. Marketers should be aware of the success revealed by the impact of YouTube. This study provides an important insight for marketers seeking ways to integrate their brand marketing strategies to new media technologies, and are interested in giving advertisement on UGC creators on social media channels. The approach of using well-known YouTubers for sponsorship is a new marketing strategy that companies need to be aware of. This study focuses on the importance of new media technologies for brand advertisements. This study is the one of the first to investigate the sponsorship effect in UGC on YouTube, and contributes also to the practice by investigating advertisement opportunities with UGC creators on YouTube.

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Social media has transformed the tourism industry, shifting it from its conventional model into an extreme knowledge pattern. This study focuses on the use of social media for tourism marketing to enhance tourist satisfaction through user-generated content. A mixed research method was employed, with an exploratory approach used to identify the critical success factors of social media user-generated content (UGC) for marketing tourism products. Purposive sampling was utilized, and data were collected from 200 respondents. To analyze the data, frequency distribution, multiple regression, and hypothesis testing were employed for user-generated content on social media for tourism marketing. The results of the study reveal that people spend an average of one to six hours daily on social media platforms. Graduate students aged 21-30 and employed individuals are more likely to use social media for travel purposes. The study also indicates that factors such as advocacy, a positive brand impression, travel inspiration, and careful content development are crucial for social media in tourism marketing. The travel industry provides visitors with personalized services, offering a social media network that systematically shares users' and like-minded people's experiences, allowing users to customize their anonymity and add value to their personal details.

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As the World Wide Web has developed considerable bargaining power has been transferred from suppliers to consumers; there is a real need to improve market intelligence and market research for private and public tourism organisations and facilitate timely consumer decision making. This article explores the development of user generated content and specifically the use of web logs or blogs. Tourism organisations cannot afford to ignore the development of user generated content, peer-to-peer web applications and virtual communities. A recent survey found that consumers trusted more websites with reviews than professional guides and travel agencies and far from being an irrelevance, blogs are often perceived to be more credible and trustworthy than traditional marketing communications. But there is a problem: given the sheer number of possibly relevant travel blogs there is a need to locate, extract and interpret blog content and this has proven so far to be time consuming, exhausting and costly, thus negating the relative value of the information obtained. A way forward may be the use of artificial intelligence and “opinion mining” or a blog visualisation system.

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With the rapid development of the internet, people rely more and more on the internet to get information about products to buy and share their own shopping experience. Frequent information exchange and interaction among virtual community members further expand the influence of community marketing, so community reputation and network interaction can largely influence consumers' purchase intention. Therefore, it is necessary to explore which factors in the network word of mouth and network interaction can have a greater impact on consumers' purchase intention. This study takes users in Xiaohongshu app as the research object to discuss which factors in UGC (UGC stands for user generated content, where users present their original content to other users over the web.) community can have a greater impact on consumers' purchase intention. First study relevant literature review and analysis of the development features of the UGC community, Xiaohongshu notes distributors, notes the quantity, quality, note titer, interactive network environment, network interactive features, network degree these seven factors as a model of the independent variable, to network trust as an intervening variable to explore the impact on the consumer purchase intention; After that, the available scales and questionnaires were collected through literature review. Finally, the discussion is made according to the data analysis results.

Fully revised and updated for its fifth edition, Hospitality and Travel Marketing provides students with an international and systematic approach to hospitality and travel marketing structured around planning, research, implementation, control, and evaluation. Written in a user-friendly style and structured in a logical and organized manner to aid learning, students benefit from the ease of communication, practical nature, and excellent use of relevant and up-to-date cases. The author's global experience in the industry is emphasized through content on hospitality and travel marketing and other parts of tourism, along with a plethora of timely and relevant ‘real-life’ case examples from around the world. This new fifth edition is positioned as a post-COVID-19 text, reflecting the new realities of marketing after the pandemic, and has been updated to reflect these current trends in the field, including e-marketing, mobile marketing, societal marketing, and destination branding. It specifically has been updated by: • Including three new technology chapters on e-marketing, marketing on social media platforms, electronic customer relationship management (eCRM), and customer co-creation in marketing • A new chapter on social responsibility, societal and social marketing • New content on the new realities of the post-COVID era and the increasing competitiveness in hospitality and travel, greater emphasis on branding, disruptive technologies, consumer control, marketing and generations, uses of user-generated content, and globalization • New global case studies throughout with reflective questions to use in class or for self-study • New marketing and e-marketing mini cases throughout the book • New and updated additional resources to aid understanding and teaching, including PowerPoint slides This international, accessible, and comprehensive whole-industry textbook, written by a world-renowned author and industry expert, is an invaluable study companion for students of hospitality and travel marketing.

The Internet has enabled a new era of user-generated content, threatening the hegemony of traditional content generators as the primary sources of “legitimate” information. In this study, we examine the usefulness of such content, consisting of data from blogs and social networking sites, in predicting sales in the music industry. We track changes in online chatter for a sample of 108 albums for four weeks before and after their release dates. We identify the significance of variables on the observation date in predicting future album unit sales one, two, and three weeks ahead. Our findings are that future sales are positively correlated with (a) the volume of blog posts about an album, and (b) traditional factors such as whether the album is released by a major label and reviews from mainstream sources like Rolling Stone. More generally, the study provides some preliminary answers for marketing managers interested in assessing the relative importance of the burgeoning number of “Web 2.0” information metrics that are becoming available on the Internet. The study also provides a framework for thinking about when user-generated content influences decision making.

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ABSTRACTThe advent of Web 2.0 technologies has enabled the efficient creation and distribution of user-generated content (UGC), resulting in vast changes in the online media landscape. For instance, the proliferation of UGC has made a strong impact on consumers, media suppliers, and marketing professionals while necessitating research in order to understand both the short and long-term implications of this media content. This exploratory study (n = 325) seeks to investigate consumer consumption and creation of UGC and the attitudinal factors that contribute to these actions. The data confirm the established relationship between attitude and behavior and indicate attitude serves as a mediating factor between the use and creation of UGC. With regard to the creation of UGC, the ego-defensive and social functions of attitude were found to have the most explanatory power. Additional informationABOUT THE AUTHORSTerry Daugherty (Ph.D., Michigan State University) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Advertising and Co-Director of the Media Research Lab <http://mediaresearch.communication.utexas.edu/> at The University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on understanding consumer psychology by investigating strategic, social, and technological issues involving the mass media with work appearing in the Journal of Advertising, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Journal of Consumer Psychology, Journal of Interactive Advertising, Journal of Interactive Marketing, and the International Journal of Internet Marketing and Advertising, among numerous other scholarly publications. Email: Terry.Daugherty@mail.utexas.edu.Matthew S. Eastin (Ph.D., Michigan State University) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Advertising and Co-Director of the Media Research Lab <http://mediaresearch.communication.utexas.edu/> at The University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Eastin1s research focuses on investigating information processing as well as the social and psychological factors associated with new media behavior including game play involvement, media adoption, e-commerce, and e-health. Dr. Eastin1s work can be found in the Journal of Communication, Communication Research, Human Communication Research, Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, CyberPsychology & Behavior, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, and Computers in Human Behavior, to name a few. Email: Matt.Eastin@mail.utexas.edu.Laura Bright (Ph.D. Candidate., University of Texas at Austin) is a doctoral student in the Department of Advertising at The University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests focus on interactive media, digital content management and understanding consumer consumption of media. Email: lbright@seedling.com.

This paper deals with participatory communication in the field of the promotion of cultural institutions. Creativity is an important factor in the success and effectiveness of marketing communication. This phenomenon has not yet been explored in relation to the creativity of user-generated content. This research addresses the question of whether creativity is a significant factor in the success of UGC (user generated content). Analysis of the outputs generated by the recipients of the communication issued by the Getty Museum in Los Angeles – and their interpretation of the works of art available to the museum. We used a modified method of evaluating creativity developed by Smith et. al. (2007). We used correlation analysis to analyze our data. The findings show that creativity is an important factor in the design of the communication strategy rather than in the success of specific UGC products.

Social media has become an important tool in establishing relationships between companies and customers. However, creating effective content for social media marketing campaigns is a challenge, as companies have difficulty understanding what drives user engagement. One approach to addressing this challenge is to use analytics on user-generated social media content to understand the relationship between content features and user engagement. In this paper we report on a quantitative study that applies machine learning algorithms to extract textual and visual content features from Instagram posts, along with creator- and context-related variables, and to statistically model their influence on user engagement. Our findings can guide marketing and social media professionals in creating engaging content that communicates more effectively with their audiences.

The continuing rise of the internet as a communications tool for travel and tourism presents challenges for destination marketing organizations and tourism enterprises. Previous research has suggested that the internet contributes to five key functions — promotion, product distribution, communication, management and research. This paper examines how Web 2.0 applications, and specifically the increasing number of travel blogs, might influence these functions. The research reviewed the published literature and real-life examples of destination marketing organizations and tourism enterprises using blogs as part of their business strategy. Some interesting examples were found for each of the functions, which may point the way to more effective use of user generated content by the tourism industry, while also revealing challenges to achieving this.

In the current information-rich digital marketing environment, TikTok is a rapidly growing social media platform, and its user base has exceeded 1.562 billion in January 2024. However, with the over-saturation of brand-generated content and social media advertising, consumers attention to brand-generated information has shown a downward trend. Gradually, user-generated content (UGC) has become a mature marketing paradigm in recent years. UGC relies on users' creativity and subjective preference, entirely in contrast to the brand's official content, and can better stimulate consumers' interest and purchasing power. This article describes the forms of UGC and its working mechanism on TikTok and also states several advantages of UGC on TikTok by comparing it with brand-generated content (BGC). The results show that UGC enhances the brand and users interaction. It is more cost-effective than official BGC and influencer marketing strategies. Meanwhile, it also discusses the challenges UGC marketing is currently facing. Through a comprehensive analysis of UGC marketing on TikTok, this article provides insights into the dual-edgedness of UGC and how it can be effectively used to drive brand growth and user engagement in a rapidly developing informational social media environment.