Effect Of Social Media On Online Book Selling

Studies have shown that word-of-mouth will affect the majority of consumers purchasing decisions. Since the information technology began to flourish, electronic word-of-mouth, or eWOM, as well as traditional word-of-mouth, is playing an important role in the formation of consumer’s views and behavior; and its influence on business success is even higher than the latter one due to the advantage in spread speed and scope. Social media is one of the fitting carriers of eWOM, in the meantime the most efficient way of propagation. Customers affect other customers’ purchasing decisions by publishing reviews by writing articles and news on social networking sites, propagating information to other consumers and ultimately affect the sales success of the product. Marketing practitioners have recognized the significant impact of eWOM in Microblogs on product sales, but academic practitioners have not yet lead enough empirical research on this effect. This study reviews previous research on eWOM in social media network, summarizes variables in previous studies focusing on eWOM impact for product sales and microblog, takes consideration of domestic environment of social media development which includes the main social networking site Sina Weibo, uses Amazon Books Sales Rank as the proxy of book sales, integrates each factor into the same model using multiple regression analysis method, in the purpose of measuring various factors’impact on online book sales. Considering especially of the nature of the microblog, two factors related to the characteristics of the microblog were chosen, which are the percentage of forwarded microblogs and microblogs from authenticated users, in the purpose of studying whether the additional two factors can improve the regression model fit. This study found that only the factor of day-since-release among a book’s metadata has significant effect on book sales. Book category only becomes significant after eWOM factors are taken into consideration. Regression results showed statistically significant (and positive) effects on product sales of the number of weibo chatters, the proportion of forwarded chatter and those from authenticated users. The theoretical contribution of this study stays in that it combines different variables which have different impact on sales success into Chinese context, puts microblog-like factors into the regression equation to measure the variables and test the model fit, which revealed eWOM effect on product sales success in the domestic microblog environment. The practical contribution of this paper is that, through analyzing different beta coefficient and significance of each variables, we can tell the corporate marketing practitioners, publishers, retailers and book authors how to lead a successful word-of-mouth marketing campaign through microblog to get the maximum effect. In particular, as microblog is so popular in the domestic context, they should know from this study who and what to concern about in microblog to get more attention.