A Hashtag Is Worth a Thousand Words: An Empirical Investigation of Social Media Strategies in Trademarking Hashtags

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Kumar, Naveen; Qiu, Liangfei; Kumar, Subodha
• 署名单位: University of Oklahoma System; University of Oklahoma - Norman; State University System of Florida; University of Florida; Pennsylvania Commonwealth System of Higher Education (PCSHE); Temple University
• 刊物名称: INFORMATION SYSTEMS RESEARCH
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1047-7047
• DOI: 10.1287/isre.2022.1107
• 发表日期: 2022
• 页码: 1403-1427
• 关键词: online platforms; SIGNALING THEORY; brand community; website quality; Text analysis; INNOVATION; consumer; IMPACT; INFORMATION; management

摘要

Firms of all sizes are joining the conversation on social media platforms and increasingly trademarking hashtags related to their products and brands. This added effort to protect intellectual property and its impact on social media engagement have not been investigated in the literature. In this study, we attempt to bridge this important gap in the literature by first examining the impact of trademarking a hashtag on a firm's social media audience engagement. By adopting multiple causal identification strategies to address the issues of self-selected trademarking, we find that trademarking hashtags plays a pivotal role in increasing social media audience engagement and information dissemination. More importantly, this positive effect is stronger for firms with fewer Twitter followers. Digging deeper into the underlying mechanisms, we find that trademarking hashtags makes composing tweets with certain linguistic styles more critical: It can amplify the positive effects of trademarking hashtags on social media audience engagement. Our findings highlight important managerial implications of trademarking hashtags. First of all, we examine whether trademarking a hashtag helps or hurts a firm in terms of its social media audience engagement. Further, we show, to maximize the effectiveness of trademarking hashtags, how firms should develop the right social media engagement strategies by taking specific communication and linguistic styles into account. Our results provide useful insights to firms in understanding the key benefits of signaling through trademarking hashtags on socialmedia engagement.