While marketing on social media fan pages has received widespread research attention, few studies have investigated the impact of adding a showroom to a social media fan page. Showrooms on social media fan pages are unique in that they can amplify the conflicts between businesses’ commercial purposes (selling) and customers’ expectations (socializing) on social media, making it unclear how they might influence customer behavior. In this study, we open this black box by using data from a leading fashion retailer. We found that adding a showroom to a fan page has both positive implications, in that it leads to more user engagement and purchases, and negative implications, in that it leads users to “unfollow” the retailer’s social media fan page. We further found that such impact is moderated by customer willingness to disclose private information. Specifically, the positive (negative) implication is significantly greater (smaller) for customers who are willing to disclose their private information to the retailer on social media. Mechanism-level analyses suggest that adding a showroom to a fan page can increase customer purchases both directly and indirectly by facilitating their engagement with the fan page and that customer willingness to disclose private information negatively moderates the mediation effect of user engagement on purchase behavior. In addition, results from an online experiment indicate that such showrooms can increase unfollowing by undermining users’ social perception of the fan page and raising users’ privacy concerns. Our findings suggest that even when firms see a significant increase in user purchase and activities after adding a showroom on their fan pages, they should carefully consider the potential risk of driving away customers and strategically target users who are less privacy sensitive.

中文翻译：

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社交媒体商业化？社交媒体粉丝页面上的陈列室如何影响客户行为


虽然社交媒体粉丝页面上的营销受到了广泛的研究关注，但很少有研究调查在社交媒体粉丝页面上添加陈列室的影响。社交媒体粉丝页面上的陈列室的独特之处在于，它们可以放大企业商业目的（销售）与客户在社交媒体上的期望（社交）之间的冲突，从而使人们不清楚它们如何影响客户行为。在这项研究中，我们利用一家领先时尚零售商的数据打开了这个黑匣子。我们发现，在粉丝页面上添加陈列室既有积极的影响，因为它会带来更多的用户参与和购买，也有负面的影响，因为它会导致用户“取消关注”零售商的社交媒体粉丝页面。我们进一步发现，这种影响会受到客户披露私人信息的意愿的影响。具体来说，对于愿意在社交媒体上向零售商披露私人信息的客户来说，积极（消极）影响明显更大（更小）。机制层面的分析表明，在粉丝页面上添加陈列室可以通过促进客户与粉丝页面的互动来直接和间接地增加客户的购买量，并且客户披露私人信息的意愿会负面调节用户参与对购买行为的中介作用。此外，在线实验的结果表明，此类展示厅可以通过破坏用户对粉丝页面的社会认知并引发用户的隐私担忧来增加取消关注。 我们的研究结果表明，即使公司在粉丝页面上添加展示厅后发现用户购买和活动显着增加，他们也应该仔细考虑赶走客户的潜在风险，并战略性地瞄准对隐私不太敏感的用户。