Title: Social Media Engagement and Performance of E-Tailers: A Quasi-Experimental Analysis

　　Lecturer: Associate Professor Ren Fei

　　Time: 108.00.24 (Thursday) 10:00 am

　　Location: Main Building 317

　　Speaker Profile:

　　Ren Fei, currently an associate professor of Management Science and Information Systems Department of Guanghua School of Management, Peking University, was the first batch of "Guanghua Research Scholars" winners. She received her doctorate in management (in the direction of information system) at the University of California, Irvine. He graduated from Peking University with a bachelor's degree in computer software and a master's degree in finance. Ren Fei's research interests center around the impact and the mechanism of information technology on individuals, businesses, and society. This includes information system investment performance and business value, social media effects and mechanisms, and user online behavior. Her research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Ministry of Education, and the Guanghua School of Management. Many of the results were published in top international academic journals, such as Information Systems Research and Journal of Management Information Systems, and received the thirteenth humanities and society of Peking University. Ren Fei has opened many Chinese and English courses for undergraduates, MBAs and doctoral students, including e-commerce, business simulation and leadership reflection, social media and digital competition, and information system research methods.

　　Brief introduction:

　　While prior literature mainly focuses on the effect of social media marketing on individual consumer behavior, we study the economic value of firm social media marketing at the firm level. Specifically, we quantify the sales effect of firm social media marketing from an integrated social commerce platform, and examine how such effect varies with firm characteristics. By a quasi-experimental design and using Propensity Score Matching (PSM) and Difference-in-Differences (DID) methods, we find that firm social media marketing significantly promotes sales at the firm level. Specifically, firms selling low-involvement products benefit more (with a sales elasticity of 27.89%) from social media marketing efforts, compared to those selling high-involvement products (a sales elasticity of 19.84%). Meanwhile, the sales effect of firm social media marketing increases over time. We also find that firm social media marketing with more followers and more blogpostings enhances firm sales more. Our results hold for various robustness checks, and we apply control function model to remove potential hidden bias in the matching process. Overall, our findings suggest that social media marketing plays an important role in firm marketing activities, and firms need suitable strategy to gain from their social media marketing efforts.