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The impact of social media input intensity on firm performance: Evidence from Sina Weibo

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  • Zu, Xu
  • Diao, Xinyi
  • Meng, Zhiyi

Abstract

The aim of the present paper is to determine whether launching social media accounts affects the performance of a firm, assess the impact of firms’ different social media input intensity on their performance, and identify whether there is a linear or nonlinear relationship between firm performance and social media input intensity. To this end, this paper takes panel data, matching data for private listed firms from Sina Weibo and the China Stock Market & Accounting Research Database between the years of 2010 and 2014 as an example to empirically investigate the abovementioned issues. The results show that: (1) launching Weibo accounts does indeed enhance the performance of firms; (2) greater Weibo input intensity leads to a greater improvement in performance; (3) Weibo input intensity has a nonlinear impact on firm performance, and, more specifically, there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between input intensity and performance; and (4) firm size has a significantly positive influence on the relationship between Weibo input intensity and firm performance, but the type of real controller of firm does not have a statistically significant impact on the relationship between the two. This paper innovatively investigates the nonlinear impact of social media input intensity on firm performance, while previous work investigated only their linear relationship. Another contribution of this work is that the existing customer-oriented literature mainly utilized questionnaire data, which may be subject to human manipulation, while this paper collected Weibo data through data mining, making the research more comprehensive and accurate.

Suggested Citation

  • Zu, Xu & Diao, Xinyi & Meng, Zhiyi, 2019. "The impact of social media input intensity on firm performance: Evidence from Sina Weibo," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 536(C).
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:536:y:2019:i:c:s0378437119314621
    DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2019.122556
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