The Relationship Between Use of Social Media and Customer Relationship from E-commerce Model Perspective

Abstract: In recent years, the impact of social media is drawing more attention from researchers and E-commerce companies. Most researchers and e-commerce companies think that using social media may benefit for e-commerce. And some e-commerce companies started to involve social media into their business. However, do social media really make a big contribution to e-commerce? Similarly traditional business, since managing customer relationships is still important work for e-commerce. This study regards customer relationship as one aspect of e-commerce and focuses to identify the relationship between use of social media and customer relationship. To fulfill our research objective, this study adopted a business model approach that applies the concept of customer relationship, an element of the e-business model ontology, as the starting point to develop our research model. And we supposed social media use has a positive relation with customer relationship, as well as its three components. Further, a quantitative empirical study has been used to examine these hypotheses. After the empirical study, we presented the results of our hypotheses and updated our research model. At the end, an indirect relationship between social media use and customer relationship were found. The limitation of this study and recommendations for further study were also addressed in the final section.