Research On Firm Wechat Platform Use Impact On Performance: The Mediation Of Value Co-Creation And CRM Capability

Diversification of social media enriches the interaction between organizations and between organizations and individuals. All parts of society are in interconnected environment, coupled with the scarcity of resource; it is difficult for enterprises alone to gain long-term development. Therefore, more and more companies realize the importance of seeking win-win with partners by using new social media. In China, as an emerging social media, wechat, with hundreds of millions of users has brought a shock theoretically. However, research on wechat platform use is still in its infancy. Some studies have focused on the technical aspects of wechat platform use, some have focused on features and most are based on individual level. There are few studies on firm wechat platform use and its impact on firm level. To enrich the research in this area, we will regard firm wechat platform use as starting point and will exaimine the mechanism from firm wechat platform use to firm performance, through value co-creation and customer relationship management (CRM) capability, at the enterprise level.This study will examine how firm wechat platform use influence enterprise through a model built around four key factors:firm wechat platform use, CRM capability, value co-creation and firm performance.In this study, network questionnaire is used to collect data, filling up by general manager or manager of the enterprise information. All samples are from the Chinese local companies, covering manufacturing, services, financial services, etc. We collected a total of 235 valid data. PLS and SPSS are used to analyze the reliability and validity. Partial least squares is used to verify the hypotheses and multiple regression analysis is used to test the mediation.The results indicate that firm wechat platform use positively influences value co-creation and CRM capability respectively, CRM capability and value co-creation positively influences firm performance, and value co-creation partly mediated the relationship between firm wechat platform use and firm performance and between CRM capability and firm performance, CRM capability partly mediated the relationship between firm wechat platform use and firm performance.At last, the discussion of results and the implications and limitations of the research are presented, and suggestions for future research are provided.