Intrinsic Characteristics or Earned It? A Discussion of Firm Attractive Traits and Their Social Media Engagement

Abstract

Celebrity firms can gain management, marketing, and financial benefits. Being popular on social media has been proven to have a similar effect. Based on nearly 5,000 actively traded US firms data, this paper discusses the factors that drive users to follow them. The factors were explored from two aspects: the firm’s intrinsic characteristics and firm social media engagement. Our results show that there are ”engaging traits” that attract users meaning that some firms are ‘born-to-be’ more popular than others. Luckily for those less attractive firms, they can take advantage of social media engagements to increase their popularity levels and to eventually enjoy marketing and management benefits, because social media engagements have stronger impacts on the level of firm celebrity. However, firm intrinsic characteristics, which have long been ignored by previous studies, might play a bigger role in the future with the diminishing marginal returns of social engagements.