An Exploration of the Dynamics Between Social Media and Box Office Performance

Prior studies have reported the positive impact of social media on box office performance. There is limited evidence of the dynamics of the positive impact and how box office performance influences social media. This study examines how owned social media (OSM) and earned social media (ESM) impact box office performance in a dynamic manner and vice versa in the opening week of movies. We also examine how these impacts vary with firm size of a movie’s marketing company and platform specificity of where the movie is advertised. We applied the panel vector auto-regression method to analyze a merged dataset of 289 movies distributed in the Chinese movie market. We found that OSM and ESM had different impacts on box office performance. Box office performance reacted faster to ESM than to OSM and the reaction lasted longer to OSM than to ESM. In addition, the impact of OSM was more significant for large firms while ESM’s impact was more significant for small firms. Finally, social media on specialized platforms did not have a faster impact on box office performance than that on general platforms. The impact on general platforms did not last longer than that on specialized platform. Overall, we recommend movie marketing firms develop tailored social media strategies by means of customizing their choices of social media based on firm size and platform specificity.