Strategic Social Media Marketing: An Empirical Analysis of Sequential Advertising

Social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook have emerged as effective channels for advertising that enable consumer targeting based on demographics, interests, and user behavior. Furthermore, social media marketing has utilized information spillover within a social network to reach a larger customer base. This information spillover exists across groups within the platform and can enhance returns from social media advertising that is targeting multiple audience groups. Thus, strategic delaying (or sequencing) of targeting subsequent audience builds on the information already consumed and retained as a result of spillover. In this paper, we present a theoretical model for information retention and show that the sequential advertising strategy is effective in targeting groups of users on a social media platform. In addition, we provide empirical evidence through two series of randomized field experiments. From one experiment, we find that sequential advertising campaigns provides 10.61 more clicks, every 4-hours, for a health services organization when compared to campaigns that are targeting groups simultaneously. From second experiment we find that, for a consumer goods retailer, targeting first a small group followed by a large group provides 0.01% and 0.02% increase in sales, every 4-hours, from Facebook and Twitter respectively. These results provide implications for social advertising research and practice.