Social media marketing has been shown to be most effective when encouraging consumers to start posting

Social media is an important marketing tool that helps companies increase awareness when launching new products. The platform helps inform consumers about the product's features and benefits compared to competitors' products.

A new study from the University of Notre Dame analyzes data from the movie industry, which often relies on social media promotion, to understand how marketers can more effectively promote other new products.

“The ripple effect of corporate-generated content on new movie releases”; Marketing Research Journal Lead author Shijie Lu, the Howard J. and Geraldine F. Coase Associate Professor of Marketing in the Notre Dame Mendoza College of Business, said that 159 movies were created by companies in connection with We analyzed 145,502 Twitter posts and 5.9 million user-generated Twitter posts.

Lu and co-authors Isaac Dinner of Indeed and Rajdeep Grewal of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found that corporately generated content (FGC) has significant positive spillover effects on film sales. FGC increases user-generated content (UGC) and drives movie consumption.

Traditionally, it has been thought that social media allows marketers to directly influence the purchasing behavior of their followers. However, our findings indicate that FGC in new product releases works indirectly through UGC and word-of-mouth spread by followers of companies' social media accounts.

The researchers looked at Twitter posts about movies released by the top 20 US studios between January 2014 and June 2015. The movie had 486 unique Twitter handles associated with it, including 158 movie accounts, 310 actor and director accounts, and 18 studio accounts. They conducted an econometric analysis to test the relationship between FGC, UGC, and box office revenue.

“Interestingly, even when multiple social media accounts for a movie's actors, directors, and studios are used to promote a new movie, FGC from the main movie account drives more sales than other company-related accounts. It’s more effective in stretching,” Lu said. “But UGC that comes from that main account brings in even more sales. So FGC from famous actors and directors who are active on social media won't boost box office sales as much as UGC from fans. ”

Additionally, regular posts by companies with movie-specific hashtags are more effective than replies, retweets, and posts without hashtags.

“This suggests that movie company executives should focus on creating FGCs that spark conversations among their followers when new movies are released,” Lu said. “A recent retweet of her father wearing a Barbie costume while taking his daughter to the movies about the 'Barbie' movie is a great example of how followers spontaneously started talking about the movie. is.”

Although the study focused on movies, Lu said the results can be generalized to other products such as TV shows, games, music and books.