Social media services, such as Twitter, enable
commercial businesses to participate actively in online wordof-mouth
communication. In this project, we examined the
potential influences of business engagement in online wordof-mouth
communication on the level of consumers’ engagement
and investigated the trajectories of a business’ online
word-of-mouth message diffusion in the Twitter community.
We used path analysis to examine 164,478 tweets from
96,725 individual Twitter users with regards to nine brands
during a 5-week study period. We operationalized business
engagement as the amount of online word-of-mouth messages
from brand and the number of consumers the brand
follows. We operationalized consumers’ engagement as the
number of online word-of-mouth messages from consumers
both connecting to the brand and having no connection with
the brand as well as the number of consumers following the
brand. We concluded that the business engagement on Twitter
relates directly to consumers’ engagement with online wordof-mouth
communication. In addition, retweeting, as an
explicit way to show consumers’ response to business
engagement, indicates that the influence only reaches consumers
with a second-degree relationship to the brand and
that the life cycle of a tweet is generally 1.5 to 4 hours at most.
Our research has critical implications in terms of advancing
the understanding of the business’s role in the online word-ofmouth
communication and bringing insight to the analytics of
social networks and online word-of-mouth message diffusion
patterns.