Deutschenglish

Assessing the Effectiveness of Social Media Marketing based on Complex Network Analysis

Project status: finished

In recent years the online business environment is viewed by customers from a new perspective. Social media to a great extent affects the customer’s awareness, preference and even decision process. Dramatic developments in interactive social media have fundamentally changed the rules and performance of the marketing ecosystem. Compared to the traditional business model, consumers make use of social media platforms to influence other buyers through online interactivity. Consumers have changed their roles in the process of communication to actively participate in content creation, instead of passively accepting information released by firms. Marketing-related user-generated content has been one of the core schemes that firms create, maintain and improve the relationships with consumers in virtual communities. While more enterprises turned their attentions to invest in their social media platforms for exploiting the potential of online social marketing, a lack of available and reliable measurements for the effectiveness of social media marketing retards them to associate the social media initiatives with organizational goals. Thus, scholars suggest that effective measurements for social media should take into account consumers’ motivations to generate individual contents resulting from interactions, as well as the measuring metrics are able to quantify the long-term returns of investing in social media. This project concentrates on the interactivity of social media, and endeavours to establish a set of practical classification methods based on extracting interactivity attributes. A review of literature results in research hypothesis revolving around four necessary properties of social media: users’ motives, user-generated content, network structure, and social roles & interactions. Quantitative analyses will be adopted to verify the hypotheses and make conclusions.