Social Media Marketing Models in Digital Economy

Abstract

Social media has achieved burgeoning popularity amid the booming digital economy in recent years. The emergence and rapid development of various social media platforms, including user-generated content (UGC), live streaming, and short-video have dramatically reshaped consumer behaviors and firm strategies. On one hand, the rising of UGC platforms has facilitated a critical mass of users to generate and consume contents and interact with peers. How to incentivize users’ engagement and leverage the wide heterogeneity of users to maximize content profits are some of the most critical challenges for UGC platforms. On the other hand, live streaming creates a new channel of real-time dynamic social interactions among users, and the rapid growth of streaming media has spawned the proliferation of influencers who can attract and retain audiences through strategic content creation. The unique features of live streaming make it significantly interesting to delve into many unexplored problems in this distinct context. It is also worthwhile to examine the optimal strategies employed by influencers to gain and retain their popularity. This seminar focuses on these social media platforms and employs a multi-disciplinary research paradigm integrating marketing, social psychology, and behavioral economics. Leveraging the large-scale field experiments, machine learning techniques, and empirical modelling based on real data from the social media industry, the results reveal the underlying mechanisms of user engagement and platform profitability from a multi-stakeholder perspective. The findings advance the theoretical knowledge and empirical modelling methodologies on social media marketing, and offer important implications for practitioners to incentivize user engagement and maximize profits in social media platforms.

Speaker

Prof. Xingyu Chen is currently a Professor of Marketing and the Associate Dean of the College of Management at Shenzhen University. She received her PhD in Systems and Engineering Management from Nanyang Technological University and was a visiting scholar at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Prof. Chen’s research interests focus on online user behaviors and social media marketing modeling. Her research has been published in a number of prestigious journals, including Marketing Science, Journal of Marketing Research, Production and Operations Management, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of the Association for Information Systems, International Journal of Research in Marketing, Decision Support Systems, New Media & Society, etc. Her cases were published in the Ivey Business Cases and CMCC. Prof. Chen also serves as an Associate Editor for Industrial Management & Data Systems (IMDS). Her research has been funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Youth and General). She has received the University Outstanding Youth Scientist Award, Tencent Best Teaching Award, MBA Best Teaching Award, and multiple conference awards. Before joining academia, Prof. Chen also worked as Head of Product Manager at leading Internet firms in Singapore.