When daily deal services meet Twitter: understanding Twitter as a daily deal marketing platform

Twitter, a microblogging service which enables users to build social networks and share information, has been recognized as a potentially powerful marketing platform. Daily deal service is one of the many types of businesses that leverage Twitter for marketing purpose; daily deal providers such as Groupon and LivingSocial are not only engaged in active interactions with their potential customers on Twitter but are also encouraging the customers to participate in advertising products through Twitter. Despite the recent surge of interest in studying Twitter as a medium of information diffusion, little is understood about the daily deal information sharing behavior on Twitter. In this research we pose following questions: what kind of daily deals are being talked about in Twitter, when, and how? In order to answer these questions we crawl and analyze a large-scale Twitter and Groupon data to understand the characteristics of the user-generated tweets containing the URL links to daily deals. We also examine the relationship between the sharing of tweets and the actual sales performance of the daily deal service based on the data collected from LivingSocial. We discover the demands of users reflected through Twitter and characterize the customers' information sharing patterns across Twitter. Further, we provide evidence that sharing daily deals on Twitter contributes to the improved sales performance. These findings shed light on the significance of Twitter as a marketing platform, providing key insights for businesses to consider in formulating social marketing strategies.

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