Exploring the Recent Trend Shift in Marketing Research: Social Media (Big) Data and its Sampling Property

This paper attempt explores a recent trend shift in marketing research. More marketing researchers are using sources of big data, such as Facebook posts, Twitter threads, blogs, Instagram, and other social media data. However,... [ view full abstract ]

This paper attempt explores a recent trend shift in marketing research. More marketing researchers are using sources of big data, such as Facebook posts, Twitter threads, blogs, Instagram, and other social media data. However, the infrastructure of marketing research methodologies has not progressed in parallel with the advancement of technology and the availability of big data. For example, marketing students have been using big data and employing samples without fully appreciating the property of the big data population. Understanding the sampling properties of big data will provide invaluable hallmarks for collecting and analysing big data so that more sampling diversity can be achieved and findings that are more rigorous can be discovered to enhance research discoveries. This paper pedagogically offers an initial conceptual, theoretical, and empirical discussion that is useful for providing direction for further research analysing big data, which is in its infancy.