Impact of Engagement Allocation Across Social Platform Modalities on E-Commerce Performance

Abstract

Firms increasingly operate across multiple social media platforms, yet it remains unclear whether diversifying engagement across platforms enhances performance or simply fragments marketing efforts. We examine how the allocation of user engagement across platforms affects e commerce sales performance. Using panel data on approximately 2,000 leading U.S. online retailers from 2012 to 2019, combined with detailed engagement measures across five major social media platforms, we construct firm year indicators of engagement diversification and explore how they relate to sales performance. We find that greater diversification in engagement allocation is associated with significantly higher web sales. Importantly, this effect is not driven by platform adoption breadth or overall engagement volume. Rather than increasing traffic quantity, diversification improves conversion rates and enhances traffic quality. Mechanism analyses reveal that these performance gains stem from cross modality complementarities: engagement distributed across heterogeneous content modalities (image, video, and mixed) generates reinforcing brand exposure, whereas diversification across platforms within the same modality yields limited benefits. Furthermore, the positive effects of diversification arise only when there is sufficient overlap in audiences across platforms, providing additional evidence for a memory-reinforcement mechanism. Taken together, these findings document the importance of engagement allocation structure and highlight the role of cross-modality complementarities in multi platform digital marketing strategies.