Twitter Usage of German Online Retailers

In this paper, we investigate the role of Twitter for German online retailers based on an empirical study. We analyze Tweets of the best selling German online retailers with qualitative and quantitative methods. Based on our results, we derive a conceptual model that can be used to classify different interaction strategies for online retailers. We identify four different interaction strategies. Three strategies are based on social interactions either on Twitter or by redirecting users to other social networks. The fourth strategy is applied to promote products of the retailers’ online store. Another result is that accounts which apply a user interaction focused strategy inside of Twitter through User Mentions, have a significantly higher number of followers compared to the accounts that use other strategies. Keywords–E-commerce; Twitter; Study; Social Web.

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