Measuring the Business Value of Online Social Media Content for Marketers

Marketers have been rushing to increase their social media marketing expenditures. However, the state of empirical research, business intelligence and analytics into the business value of social media marketing engagements have still lagged behind. Prior research about the impact of social media user-generated content on aggregate sales has overlooked the qualitative aspects. Moreover, due to the co-existence of consumers and marketers in social media, how these two roles generate business value has been understudied. Therefore, this study proposes the concept of social media marketergenerated content, and investigates the business value of userand marketer-generated content, focusing on content sentiment and information. Ordinary least squares specification is employed to model sales performance. We find that the qualitative nature of social media content indeed has some business value. Specifically, we find a significant relationship between the richness of information embedded in both userand marketer-generated content and firm sales performance.