The Battle for singles' Day: How Social Media Marketing Campaigns Boost Sales

Numerous studies have shown that social media marketing strategies have positive impacts on the longterm financial performance of firms. However, whether short-term marketing campaigns have any influence on firm revenue remains unknown. This paper examines data from Singles’ Day, the world’s largest shopping event, revealing that firms’ social media efforts have a positive impact on product sales. Furthermore, we find that the two social media effort measures generally thought to have positive impacts on a firm’s long-term financial performance, richness and intensity, have no significant influence on the success of a firm’s short-term marketing campaign. Instead, relevance shows significant and positive impacts. Moreover, we compare the effects of social media marketing yields from companyowned accounts with those of employee-owned accounts, finding that employee-owned accounts have better marketing effects than company-owned ones.