Effectivenss of brand communication through microblogging

Dr Ir Nanne MigchelsDr Marcel van Birgelen

Dept of MarketingNijmegen School of Management

n.migchels@fm.ru.nl@nannemigchels

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Twitter in november 2011

• 5 000 000 000 tweets per month in november 2011 (up 110% since jan ‘11)

• 100 milion active users (up 82%).

• 55% logs in through mobile devices.    

• 400 milion unique visitors per month on Twitter.com (up 70%).

• More than 40% of active users have not posted in the past month.

• One in five tweets appears to mention a brand or organisation

• “Twitter users are more likely to impact your brand than any other social network” (TheNextWeb.com)

• “What every brand needs to know about Twitter’s “active users” problem” (BazaarVoice.com)

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Impact on communication process

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• Development of dialogue between:

• One to one / one to more than one / one to many / many to many

• Active participation

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(electronic) Word-of-mouth

Word-of-mouth is perceived as (more) credible, reliable and trustworthy. Influence on:•Public opinion (Katz and Lazarsfeld, 1955)

•Purchase decision (Engel et al., 1969; Richins, 1983)•Customer expectations (Anderson and Salisbury, 2003)

•Perception of risk (Godes and Mayzlin, 2004)

Electronic word-of-mouth is also perceived as (more) credible, reliable and trustworthy (Hennig-Thurau and Walsh, 2004; Barton, 2006) . •Despite the loss of personal interaction and social context,•It gains in reach and availability

Top of mind could also explain eWOM conversations (Berger and Schwarz, 2011)

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Influence

• Measuring diffusion trees (Baksy et al., 2009)

• Two-tier audience of followers and activity network of interactive relations (Huberman et al., 2008)

• Perceived topic expertise (Liu et al. 2010)

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Brand communications

• How do brand communications travel through the network?

- Followers indegree- Retweets- @mentions- Sentiment analysis

• Does a particular communication strategy matter?

- One to one communication- Listening to consumers- Community participation

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Research setup

• Collection of actual Twitter data, extraction of brand tweets and of related consumer tweets (235 442 valid tweets)

• Data collection through Radian6 (= full access)

• 10 weeks (november 2010 – january 2011)

• Sample of 30 brands

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Results

• All measures strongly correlate > all hint at the same construct of influence

• One to one - effect on mentions and followers (less effect on sentiment)

• Community participation - moderate effect on all measures

• Listening to consumers - size of following, will predict number of followers - negative effect on retweets and

sentiment

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Discussion

• Brand communication on Twitter positively influences consumer word-of-mouth

• Conversation is the cornerstone of communication strategy.

• Direct reach does not impact conversations. • Being the topic of conversation does have an impact.

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