Marketing Ecosystem: The Dynamics of Twitter, TV Advertising, and Customer Acquisition

Social media, especially the micro-blogging network Twitter, have gained much popularity among users and have thus attracted attention from firms. Social media can serve as advertising media and platforms of online wordof-mouth, because they enable consumers to share their consumption experiences with others easily. When firms advertise their products and services, they usually do not rely on one single medium. Instead, they combine various media to promote their products and services. Recently, they have started to include social media. The aim of this paper is to capture the dynamic relationships among TV advertising, tweets, offline word-of-mouth, and customer acquisition. We call these dynamics the “marketing ecosystem” and attempt to investigate this model. To achieve this goal, this paper employs a structural equation approach, which allows developing a more complete and accurate picture of the inter-relationships among constructs. We incorporate both the direct effects and the indirect effects of traditional marketing actions such as TV advertising, which in turn increase tweets and new customer acquisition. The results of our analysis show that TV advertising increases buzz on social media and offline word-of-mouth. The results also show that TV advertising, offline-word-of-mouth, and tweets have a strong impact on customer acquisition.