Reputational assets and social media marketing activeness: empirical insights from China

We explore the linkages between social media marketing activeness and reputational assets on digital platforms with a unique sample of over 8,000 customer-to-customer (C2C) sellers registered on both Taobao, China’s largest C2C online shopping platform, and Sina Weibo, China’s largest microblogging platform. A unique collaborative effort between the two platforms enables us to examine whether C2C sellers are motivated to engage in marketing activities on a separate social media platform. Applying machine learning methods, we first classify whether C2C sellers conduct social media marketing on their microblogs or not, which allows the measurement of social media marketing activeness. We then use logistic regression models and find that earned reputational assets such as the rating scores and the number of followers are significantly associated with social media marketing activeness on both platforms. However, we identify a conflict of owned reputational assets such as the shop age and the paid membership between the two platforms, which provides a potential explanation for the limited success of the cross-platform collaboration.