Measuring Social Media Content Differentiation: R&D Investment and Strategic Positioning

Firms can distinguish themselves through innovation and through the ways they communicate their value, yet how these dimensions relate in social media remains less understood. Using 420,100 posts from the verified Sina Weibo accounts of 365 listed Chinese firms during 2018–2020, this study develops ContentDiff, a firm-quarter measure that uses word embeddings to calculate the semantic distance between a firm’s content and a contemporaneous industry benchmark. The measure provides a content-based perspective on firms’ communication positions that complements expenditure- and engagement-based indicators. Panel regressions show a negative association between R&D investment and content differentiation, with a stronger association among larger firms and those with higher ESG performance. These findings extend the strategic-emphasis discussion of the R&D–marketing interface to social media content, suggesting that innovation investment and communicative distinctiveness do not necessarily move together. The negative association is consistent with a compensatory-positioning interpretation, although differences in business models and communication priorities may also contribute. Managers can use industry-relative content comparisons to identify how their messages differ from those of peers and examine whether those differences reflect their intended value proposition.