Research profile: Qi Deng

Qi Deng is an information systems researcher. His research interests include business analytics, natural language processing, computer-mediated communication, online community and design science. As one example, Dr. Deng investigates how linguistic styles of brand posts influence consumer engagement on social media and finds that the emotionality, complexity and informality of brand Facebook posts impact consumer engagement, but the effects vary regarding the three consumer engagement behaviours (i.e., like, share, comment).

As a second example, Dr. Deng examines how emojis shape consumer engagement with brands on Twitter and finds that they increase consumer engagement by enhancing the perceived playfulness of brand tweets. The findings of these studies improve our understanding of the role that language plays in brand-consumer communications on social media and provide guidelines for social media marketers on how to better design brand posts from the perspective of linguistics (i.e., linguistic styles, use of emojis, etc.).

As a third example, Dr. Deng studies how social media analytics can be integrated with marketing to maximize the benefits of business networks in the social media era. As a result, he and his colleagues proposed a social media analytics capability development model that consists of four interdependent levels (i.e., technological, operational, managed and strategic levels). The proposed model provides a roadmap for business to prescribe the impacts of social media analytics and develop their own capability to harness the benefits of social media analytics.