Social Media Brand Community and Consumer Behavior: Quantifying the Relative Impact of User- and Marketer-Generated Content

TLDR: This paper integrated qualitative user-marketer interaction content data from a fan page brand community on Facebook and consumer transactions data to assemble a unique data set at the individual consumer level and quantify the impact of community contents from consumers and marketers on consumers' apparel purchase expenditures.

Abstract: Despite the popular use of social media by consumers and marketers, empirical research investigating their economic values still lags. In this study, we integrate qualitative user-marketer interaction content data from a fan page brand community on Facebook and consumer transactions data to assemble a unique data set at the individual consumer level. We then quantify the impact of community contents from consumers (user-generated content, i.e., UGC) and marketers (marketer-generated content, i.e., MGC) on consumers' apparel purchase expenditures. A content analysis method was used to construct measures to capture the informative and persuasive nature of UGC and MGC while distinguishing between directed and undirected communication modes in the brand community. In our empirical analysis, we exploit differences across consumers' fan page joining decision and across timing differences in fan page joining dates for our model estimation and identification strategies. Importantly, we also control for potential ...