Influencing Factors of Micro-Blogging Marketing of Travel Service Provider - An Empirical Research in China

Micro-blogging has emerged as a powerful social medium in spotlight since Twitter launched in the US in 2006, it has already changed the transmission mode of heterogeneous information, and even the interaction patterns both in human behavior and thoughts. More and more companies have launched micro-blogging marketing to communicate with customers, to achieve brand promotion and to form a gorgeous corporate image. For the purpose of providing companies with theoretical basis and reasonable proposals to effectively practice micro-blogging marketing, this paper conducted an empirical research on two largest travel service providers in China by collecting and analyzing the data from their Sina Weibo accounts, and took the text content of microbloggs into consideration to study influencing factors of micro-blogging marketing. We selected reposts as the main measure for micro-blogging marketing effect and studied the impact of conventional micro-blogging factors on reposts. We found that followers’ amount had no obvious impact on followers growth or attracting reposts, while the text content was an effective trigger, moreover, reposts presented conspicuous temporal characteristics.