در سطح بازاریابی بهینه فروشندگان C2C در رسانه های اجتماعی: شواهد از چین On the Optimal Marketing Aggressiveness Level of C2C Sellers in Social Media: Evidence from China

1 Introduction Built on the Web 2.0 technology, social media is the kind of applications that allow the creation and exchange of User Generated Content (UGC) on the Internet. It includes collaborative projects such as Wikipedia, social networking sites such as Facebook, microblogging platforms such as Twitter, and visual content communities such as YouTube. More recently, Mobile Web 2.0 (i.e., Web 2.0 evolution with mobile devices) expands the scope of social media to an unprecedented scale (Kaplan & Haenlein 2010). As a result, an increasing number of merchants have employed social media as a marketing tool in electronic commerce. They can promote their goods by simply posting a message, usually containing pictures, links, and a short description of them. Compared with traditional marketing channels, social media has provided a more efficient and economic way for sellers to reach potential customers. Moreover, sellers can get feedback in real time and gain a better understanding of customers’ demands through their likes and comments, i.e., the popularity of microblogs (De Vries et al. 2012). Not only sellers benefit from social media marketing, but customers gain gratifications as well. By reading the microblogs, they can get information of the products they need. However, customers use social networks also for social connection and entertainment (Lin & Lu 2011). While they appreciate a moderate level of marketing communication on products, customers may get annoyed when a marketer is too aggressive in promoting her products. Previous literature has mainly focused on how consumer perception is affected by social media marketing (Mangold & Faulds 2009, Kaplan & Haenlein 2010). Some studies have demonstrated people’s negative attitude towards aggressive social media (and online) marketing by making survey (Grant 2005, Akar & Top¸cu 2011) and investigated the factors driving customers’ engagement with marketing information (Bauer et al. 2005, Chu & Kim 2011, Chu & Choi 2011, Tsai & Men 2013). However, the level of marketing aggressiveness has not been explicitly measured in the above studies.