Impact Of Micro-Blog Marketing On Brand Relationship Quality

Mass Social Media are developing rapidly following Web 2.0 fever and drawing more public attention to the Internet. As a new social media platform, micro-blog has become top concern of enterprises as its number of users has soared dramatically and exerts significant influence among the user group. Micro-blog has been defined as a new tool for communication while users can describe what he is doing within 140 characters and publish it into internet terminal through website, instant messenger as well as mobile phones (e.g. Short Messages). Contents can be edited and released in the form of texts, pictures and videos. Micro-blog stands out among other platforms because of its real-time transmission of information and extensive influence. It makes best use of users'fragile time with easy access. After research into current corporate micro-blog accounts and contents, a large amount of difference has been observed across industries. This paper aims to analyze the marketing effectiveness when enterprises are marketing through micro-blogs. Based on corporate micro-blog marketing reflects brand personification and maintains interactive features, this study uses brand relationship quality to test the effectiveness. By building up a structural equation model, it demonstrate that satisfaction towards corporate micro-blogs may have direct impact on the users'intent of behavior and brand quality via the intermediate impact from community awareness among micro-blog users. And the effect is partial intermediary. That is, while those who are satisfied with corporate micro-blogs feel a strong sense of community awareness, not only do they tend to maintain the focus on the enterprises in the long run, but they are also willing to spend more time in the corporate account in micro-blogs. Measurement for quality of brand relationship includes cognition, emotion and loyalty. Which means community awareness helps strengthen quality of brand relationship quality in three aspects.Further, in order to find out the factor which effects the micro-blogging satisfaction and sense of community, the contents of micro-blog marketing can be categorized into five anthropomorphic interactive information types based on brand personification and maintains interactive features. They are asking for relationship, asking for feedback and contact customer service, redirecting to other media, sales and promotion, electronic word of mouth respectively. Most micro-blogs can be categorized in one of the five types after a content analysis for all existing corporate micro-blogs. Asking for relationship accounts for the majority. In order to evaluate whether the five types of interactive information may result in significant difference to marketing, this paper begins research through satisfaction and awareness of community. The results show that different types of interactive information only affect community awareness significantly, while satisfaction variable is immune. Hence, marketing via promotion in micro-blogs should be accompanied by focus on contents.