Deal Communication Through Microblogging

Social media facilitates information dissemination and narrows the distance between merchants and consumers. However, how to better integrate social media and how to communicate promotional messages to consumers have not been fully understood by merchants. Anchoring on the concept of psychological distance, we argue that the effectiveness of social media communication depends on the degree to which consumers perceive the psychological distance of the deal communication. The social media communication data of the group-buying website were obtained from its national and city accounts. Data on the featured deals in these two cities were collected, and the sales performance of these deals was used as the indicator of the effectiveness of promotional message communication. The results indicate that promotional messages conducted on the national account induce better sales performance.