Abstract: With the development of network society, social media has gradually become an important channel for firms to contact their consumers and release key business information. Aiming to give insights to enterprise managers on content management, this study explores the relationship between the enterprise generated content (EGC) and firm’s short-term performance, and investigates the intermediary effect of social capital in the context of social media based on the signaling theory. Taking film product (a typical kind of experience good) as the study object, this paper conducts a semantic analysis on EGC released by Chinese leading enterprise of theatre chain on Micro-blog platform. We find that although both types of content released on firm’s Micro-blog account have positive impact on the firm’s online social capital (i.e. bridging and bonding social capital), only informative content as a strong signal sent to consumers can bring more offline sales revenue directly. As a weak signal, persuasive content unrelated to commercial products, has no positive impact on firm performance directly. Moreover, the online social capital plays an effective intermediary role in this process. It not only enhances the positive impact of informative advertising on actual revenue, but also weakens consumers’ potential aversion to persuasive advertising.

Key words: signaling theory, enterprise generated content (EGC), enterprise online social capital, firm short-term performance