Shall I Tweet You?

The rise of social media has provided individuals with a powerful tool to promote their image and build their own brand. The top ten most-followed users on Twitter are individual people, mostly celebrities. From a marketing perspective, we can conceptualize these individuals as personal brands with their own image and equity. The vast majority of these personal brands are part of a broader group of other personal brands (e.g., political parties, music bands, sports teams, academic departments), which we call collective brands, and whose equity partly determines the equity of the individual brand.

We assemble a dataset of 140 members of collective brands, which includes information about their activities on Twitter and information about their off-line performance. Using this data, we investigate the effect of within-collective brand (i.e., tweeting a member of the same collective brand or the collective brand itself) and between- collective brand collaboration (i.e., tweeting a member of a competing collective brand or a competing collective brand) on the share of attention that a Twitter user can draw to herself.