Social media platforms have been used by firms for a variety of purposes - for building firms’ brand image, increasing customer engagement, providing customer service, among others. However, there is very little research on content strategies adopted by traditional rival firms competing on online social media platforms. This paper seeks to fill this gap by examining whether retailers, traditionally identified as close competitors, mirror this rivalry in their social media content strategies on Twitter. To this end, this study introduces a new metric for assessing competition on online social media, based on content similarity. The authors find that retailers competing closely in traditional context show greater divergence in their content strategies on social media, and firms whose social media content strategies are less similar to content strategies of their close traditional rivals benefit from higher engagement and acquire new followers faster. In examining the mechanism of the effect, the authors find that these divergent firms’ improved performance is attributable to their superior ability to leverage the higher-level affordances of Twitter as compared to their rivals. The results of this study offer valuable insights for firms seeking to distinguish their social media content from that of their competitors.

中文翻译：

---

EXPRESS：零售商在社交媒体中的差异化：对 Twitter 上公司生成内容的调查


公司已将社交媒体平台用于多种目的 - 建立公司的品牌形象、提高客户参与度、提供客户服务等。然而，对在在线社交媒体平台上竞争的传统竞争对手公司所采用的内容策略的研究很少。本文试图通过研究传统上被视为紧密竞争对手的零售商是否在他们在 Twitter 上的社交媒体内容策略中反映这种竞争来填补这一空白。为此，本研究引入了一个基于内容相似性评估在线社交媒体竞争的新指标。作者发现，在传统环境中激烈竞争的零售商在社交媒体上的内容策略表现出更大的差异，而社交媒体内容策略与其紧密的传统竞争对手的内容策略不太相似的公司会从更高的参与度中受益，并更快地获得新的追随者。在研究这种效应的机制时，作者发现，这些不同的公司业绩的提高是由于与竞争对手相比，它们更有能力利用 Twitter 的更高层次的可供性。这项研究的结果为寻求将其社交媒体内容与竞争对手的内容区分开来的公司提供了宝贵的见解。