Exploring the benefits of social media marketing for brands and communities

Abstract

In recent years, social media becomes a new communication channel in marketing. Social media facilitate improved targeting and play a critical role in marketing operations. We collect empirical data that can be used to determine whether social media marketing actually creates brand benefits or increases product sales. We proposed a new model for measuring the effectiveness of social media marketing and explained the benefits created by different brand and user types on social media. By conducting the seemingly unrelated regression estimation (SURE) model, this research collected 1,956 valid samples from the consumers who use the social media marketing. The results show that search goods and experience goods in social media marketing create diverse effective directions in interaction effects. For mobile phone brands other than the iPhone, social benefits were nonsignificant; however, brand benefits for them were significant because of the interplay of benefits.