The Impact of Mobile Social App Usage on Offline Shopping Store Visits

This research is a first empirical investigation into the effect of mobile social app usage on consumers’ decisions to visit offline stores and how such an effect varies across consumers and carries over time. The analysis combines data on mobile app usage at the individual consumer level with a fine-grained geolocation data set. The authors find a positive effect of social app usage on consumers’ visits to brick-and-mortar stores. This effect is amplified by the consumer's mobility level and the offline store density in the consumer's neighborhood. The positive impact of social app usage carries over for up to nine days, indicating a short-term effect. Additional analyses indicate that such an effect is likely due to consumers’ social discovery of product- and store-related information via word of mouth on strong-tie social apps (i.e., instant messaging apps). These results point to new opportunities for offline retailers seeking to acquire customers via the mobile channel.