Managing Firm Social Media Communications Around Fast-Paced Product Launches

Increasing competition pushes firms to accelerate their product launches, leading to closely spaced launches within firms. Especially in fast-paced markets, such as digital entertainment, the postlaunch period of one product often overlaps with the prelaunch period of the next. Existing studies examined firm-initiated communications in separate pre- versus postlaunch periods. In contrast, the authors study the effects of a publisher's overlapping product launches on social media engagement and associated spillovers of social media posts across partners promoting the focal product: publishers, product creators, and product accounts. The regressions use daily data covering the pre- and postlaunch periods of video games released by major publishers. The results show that overlaps harm the engagement rates of publishers and product accounts but benefit creators. Partner spillovers are asymmetric: Publisher and creator posts drive engagement to product accounts but not vice versa, and creator posts benefit publishers but not vice versa. Overlap effects on spillovers are usually most prominent when overlap occurs in the focal game's prelaunch period, with limited available product information, rather than postlaunch. Partners should align their social media strategies around overlapping launches to boost engagement for the focal product: Creators should intensify communication prelaunch, whereas publishers should increase communication postlaunch.