1 SOCIAL COMMERCE AND LUXURY MARKET: AN EXPLORATORY STUDY Fabrizio Mosca, Valentina Chiaudano, Silvia Gordano Università degli Studi di Torino Abstract: This study investigates social commerce in the luxury market by analysing content on social networking sites of luxury brands. After a period of initial scepticism, luxury brands have enhanced their commitment to managing more than one social media. A maturing stream of research has emerged assessing the effects of social media platforms on luxury brands, offerings, and consumers. However, the research about social media in the luxury market is still underdeveloped when it comes to the analysis of social commerce especially when focusing our attention on how luxury brands use social media for affecting sales performance. By leveraging on the framework based on the salesmanship literature, we perform a content analysis of corporate profile on Facebook of 50 global luxury brands to investigate both the content orientation and the existence of connection among content and response of consumers in terms of comments and like. This study contributes to the literature stream of social media that deals with the emerging trends of social commerce in the luxury market. Moreover, we provide managers of luxury brands with suggestions about which contents deliver on social networks to secure consumer responses when implementing strategies that affect sales performance. Keywords: social media, social commerce, luxury brand, social networking Social commerce The notion of social commerce was introduced by Yahoo in 2005 when launching two social commerce tools: Shoposphere and Pick Lists. After that, the topic of social commerce (SC) has received more attention from both academics and practitioners (Esmaeili & Hashemi, 2019). While the first studies define social commerce as empowering e-commerce sites with social tools to facilitate engagement (review, comments, chatbot), an emerging stream of research describes social commerce as activities embodied in social networks that provide users with transactions and advertising. As explained by