I Hated the Service I Found on Groupon: Should I Hate Groupon Too? Whether Consumer Likes and Complaints about a Service on Social Media Spill over to the Deal Site

Social Media provides consumers with easy tools to express love or hate for brands, including online deal sites (e.g. Groupon). Tracking, understanding and reacting to such social media sentiment plays an important role in managing customer satisfaction and thus long-term profitability. This paper examines the impact of Facebook likes about deals and complaints on revenue performance of an online deal site providing daily discount coupons by third party local businesses. The key findings are that while complaints about merchants do not significantly affect Groupon’s revenue performance, likes about the deals affect revenue performance within 2 days. In contrast, complaints about Groupon itself do hurt revenue performance immediately and within 1 day indicating that negative feedback enter the decision process of prospective customers sooner.