Tweeting for businesses: increasing the return on investment of social media by using links

Nowadays, social media marketing is an ever-expanding method to attract customers. This study tries to explore the impact of social media activities on the return on investment of a company, especially in the business-to-business market. A model provided by Favier (2012) will be used in order to investigate the impact of URLs tweeted on trust, one component of Favier’s model, measured in terms of a retweet-to-tweet-ratio in order to gain an understanding of its effectiveness. This paper collects and codes the tweets of Intel and Oracle in order to draw a comparison of their use of social media. Several linear regression analyses indicate that the general use of links has no positive impact on trust. Only 0.3% of the variance in trust is accounted by the use of links, thus, no correlation could be determined. However, different types of links and its impact on the retweet-ratio were analyzed. The use of video, website and news links show a positive relationship with the retweet-ratio in comparison to no use of links. Furthermore, a positive relationship of communicative links in contrast to informative links can be determined. Nevertheless, not all of the results were found to be significant.