Understanding social network service as a daily deal marketing platform

Abstract

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 Living-Social are not only engaged in active interactions with their potential customers on Twitter but are also en-couraging 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 in-formation sharing behavior on Twitter. In this research following questions are posed: what kind of daily deals are being talked about in Twitter, when, and how? In order to answer these questions I crawl and ana-lyze a large-scale Twitter and Groupon data to understand the characteristics of the user-generated tweets con-taining the URL links to daily deals. I 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. I discover the demands of users reflected through Twitter and characterize the customers’ information sharing patterns across Twitter. Further, I provide evidence which shows 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.