Effects of promotion tweets on the number of followers in micro-blogging site

The effectiveness of social media marketing highly depends on the number of people who follow their accounts on social media. Thus, merchants are eager to attract more followers in order to maximize the marketing effect on social media platforms. In this study, we examine how to increase the number of followers through promotion tweets in micro-blogging site. Drawing on Expectancy theory, we argue that the number of followers would increase significantly if the promotion tweets from the merchant facilitate users with more attractive deal and require lower level of efforts. We contextualize our study on the micro-blogging account of a daily-deal group-buying merchant. The number of followers was recorded on hourly basis and the promotion tweets were collected. The results indicate the attractiveness of lucky draw product from the promotion tweet has significant effect on the increase of the follower number.