Do All Roads Lead to Rome? Exploring the Relationship Between Social Referrals, Referral Propensity and Stickiness to Video-on-Demand Websites

Köster, Antonia; Matt, C.; Hess, Thomas (2021). Do All Roads Lead to Rome? Exploring the Relationship Between Social Referrals, Referral Propensity and Stickiness to Video-on-Demand Websites. Business & information systems engineering, 63(4), pp. 349-366. Springer 10.1007/s12599-020-00660-1

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Content website providers have two main goals: They seek to attract consumers and to keep them on their websites as long as possible. To reach potential consumers, they can utilize several online channels, such as paid search results or advertisements on social media, all of which usually require a substantial marketing budget. However, with rising user numbers of online communication tools, website providers increasingly integrate social sharing buttons on their websites to encourage existing consumers to facilitate referrals to their social networks. While little is known about this social form of guiding consumers to a content website, the study proposes that the way in which consumers reach a website is related to their stickiness to the website and their propensity to refer content to others. By using a unique clickstream data set of a video-on-demand website, the study compares consumers referred by their social network to those consumers arriving at the website via organic search or social media advertisements in terms of stickiness to the website (e.g., visit length, number of page views, video starts) and referral likelihood. The results show that consumers referred through social referrals spend more time on the website, view more pages, and start more videos than consumers who respond to social media advertisements, but less than those coming through organic search. Concerning referral propensity, the results indicate that consumers attracted to a website through social referrals are more likely to refer content to others than those who came through organic search or social media advertisements. The study offers direct insights to managers and recommends an increase in their efforts to promote social referrals on their websites.

Item Type:

Journal Article (Original Article)

Division/Institute:

03 Faculty of Business, Economics and Social Sciences > Department of Business Management > Institute of Information Systems > Information Management
03 Faculty of Business, Economics and Social Sciences > Department of Business Management > Institute of Information Systems

UniBE Contributor:

Matt, Christian

Subjects:

000 Computer science, knowledge & systems
300 Social sciences, sociology & anthropology
300 Social sciences, sociology & anthropology > 330 Economics
600 Technology > 650 Management & public relations

ISSN:

1867-0202

Publisher:

Springer

Language:

English

Submitter:

Yves Roulin

Date Deposited:

03 Jul 2020 11:37

Last Modified:

06 Feb 2024 14:59

Publisher DOI:

10.1007/s12599-020-00660-1

BORIS DOI:

10.7892/boris.144516

URI:

https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/144516

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