Effects of Microblogging and Third-Party Word of Mouth on Product Sales: Empirical Study Based on Movie Box Office Revenue

This paper investigates the effects of word of mouth (WOM) through microblogging and third-party platforms on the box office revenue of a movie and the moderating role of movie popularity. The study uses a two-year panel data set of 147 movies, tweets from 120 thousand randomly selected users of Sina Weibo, and reviews from Douban.com discussing these movies in their release period and finds that both the volume of microblogging WOM and the Douban.com WOM rating have significant positive effects on box office. This research further explores the imoderating role of movie popularity and finds that the volume of microblogging WOM has a positive effect on box office only for mass movies and the Douban.com WOM rating has a positive effect only for niche movies. This paper is the first one studying both the microbloging and third-party WOM effects on product sales, and the moderating role of product characteristics.

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