Measuring The Financial Performance Of Social Media Marketing From Managerial And Investor's Perspectives

Social media marketing is known as buzz,viral,word-of-mouth marketing and guerrilla marketing.Social media tools are gaining popularity,and these are part of regular operations of a large sum of companies of all sizes: start-ups,small,medium and large corporations.Along with traditional marketing channels,social media outlets are integrated as a part of the marketing mix.It has changed the dynamics of interaction between organizations and their consumers by fostering the relationship.These dynamic channels are challenging traditional one-way marketing.Customers can become brand fans on these pages and indicate that they like the brand's posts,share them on their wall or simply comment.These behaviors of brand fans are known as social media engagement.Consumers' personality traits are also essential factor for the enhancement of user-generated contents on social media.Companies are capitalizing their financial value through social media transformation in business because of the increasing popularity of social media among consumers.Quantitative analysis of social media's financial value to the organization is crucial to justify the investment of significant resources in it.Social media enables the organization to utilize rich information about consumer decisions with the help of information technology advancement which is inaccessible through traditional media.Social media not only enables the investors to perform sentiment analysis of firm's contents but also to analyze the brand performance and its future value.it can arm the investors with unceasingly updating information about the future performance of their prospective firm,It may be the most important predictor of firm equity value function.Thus,current research analyzes the factors affecting consumer's engagement in social media with respect to behavior of liking,commenting and sharing on Facebook brand fan pages,and analyzes the mediating effect of modes of interaction and the moderating effect of culture,on relationship between post dimensions,personality traits and consumer engagement and the impact of this engagement on financial performance of the organization.Based on social learning theory,uses and gratification theory,grounded theory,personality traits theory,extended Fama and French modeling and Greet Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory,the paper makes financial performance of the organization as pointcut,and construct the theoretical framework about the effect of social media marketing on organizational financial performance,which is the theoretical base of the whole paper.This study analyzes the effect of social media marketing on the financial performance of the organization.Firstly,this paper analyzes the impact of brand fan page post content dimension's impact on social media engagement of brand fans.Secondly,it analyzes the effect of personality traits on the social media engagement of consumers,then put forward the impact of this engagement of consumers on the financial performance of the organizations.Moreover,this study also analyzes the moderating effect of cultural differences on these relationships.This paper analyzes the impact of brand post dimensions and personality traits impact on social media engagement of consumers with the moderating effect of culture based on the personality traits theory,social learning theory,uses and gratification theory,grounded theory and Greet Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory.To empirically test the hypothesis,current research analyzed empirically the data of five international Fast Food brands: Burger King(BK),Kentucky Fried Chicken(KFC),McDonald's,Subway,and Domino's,that were posting contents actively on the wall of their brand fan page on Facebook for six months period.Facebook fan pages were from three different countries: Australia(AUS),United States of America(USA)and United Kingdom(UK).The result shows that all determinants of the fan page post are not equally suitable for enhancement of social media engagement.Moreover,their impact and intensity vary across different cultures.Results also showed that the relationship between personality traits and social media engagement behaviors has been mediated by interaction modes.It is suggested that consumers possessing same personality traits from various countries react differently to the post on Facebook brand page,specifically when considering the individual's Facebook functions.Based on extended Fama and French model and vector autoregressive technique,this paper analyzes the effect of social media engagement on firm equity value and then,the this research evaluates whether social media metrics specifically in terms of Facebook(FB)and Twitter metrics are related to stock market performance.This paper also analyzes the effect of social media engagement on the organizational financial performance.Social media metrics provide a powerful source in online environment for prediction of firm performance.Moreover,this paper also analyzes,which of these metrics(Facebook and/or Twitter)has more significant assoication and discovers the dynamics of these relationships.The results indicate that social media engagement directly impacts on the firm financial performance.Moreover,FB metrics are significant leading indicators of firm equity value.Interestingly,Twitter metrics,as compared to FB metrics,are found to have significant but substantially weaker predictive relationship with organizational equity value.This research strengthens our views with a sound theoretical base and fills the gap in social media fan engagement literature.The empirical findings are supportive of the inclusion of shyness as personality traits into the model.Moreover,moderating role of culture incorporates a sound contribution to the literature of social media fan engagement.Overall,current study is an important step in understanding the factors and motives affecting consumer's Facebook and Twitter behavior and social media engagement in different cultures,and it provides fruitful insights for managers of the brands intending to utilize Facebook and Twitter as part of their promotion mix strategy.Brand fan page moderators can obtain guidance from this research in formulating their social media marketing strategies to decide which post determinants to place on the fan page.Collectively,current research extends new visions for organizational top executives and investors on organizational equity valuation and the social media power transformation.