earticle

영어

The development of information technology are leading to the rapid evolution of SNS (Social Networking Services) in various directions and industries. Initially, SNS have been used as the form of networking between user’s groups. Currently SNS has been developed towards multiple purposes and platforms such as the promotion and the advertising of a company. There are many SNSs including QQ, Weibo, and Wechat and so on in China. However, the use of companies in terms of advertising and information sharing with the customers do not meet the trend in China. Especially, there were little researches for Chinese travel agencies how to utilize SNS for attracting new customers and making them contribute to the firm’s performance. In this study, we try to investigate the impact of the firm’s characteristics and the usage of SNS on the performance of Chinese travel agencies. Based on Top 100 China travel agencies in 2009, we analyzed the relationships between firm’s characteristics and the usage of SNS, and firm’s performances in 2013. We expect that our study can contribute to the increasing academic and practical needs on the empirical evidence of the impacts of the SNS utilizations on the firm’s performance.