Social Media Marketing

Emerging Concepts and Applications

Githa Heggde,G. Shainesh

• Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan
• Jahr: 2018
• ISBN:
  9789811053238
• Thema: Commerce
• Thema: Marketing numérique

This book focuses on the role of social media as the next major game-changer. Social media has emerged as the defining trend in the last decade and continues to restructure communication and interactions between individuals, communities, governments and businesses. Researchers and marketers are still struggling with the profound impact of rapidly evolving social media on viral user-generated content, its ability to shape consumer perceptions, and the constantly changing landscape for developing business cases to proactively engage with stakeholders. The growing opportunities to "hear" about customer priorities and concerns on company managed channels as well as third-party review sites, including social media pages, across the digital space are accompanied by the challenges of responding to these conversations in real-time, which calls for a massive shift in the way marketing functions engage in dialogue with customers.

As leading users of social media in emerging markets, Indians are increasingly logging into their Facebook and Twitter accounts, with the country recording the highest growth in social networking. This book begins by discussing the impact of social media on marketing, from brand building, communications, and advertising to customization and customer engagement. The book approaches the subject matter systematically, identifying broad trends, concepts and frameworks in the first few chapters. It then goes on to address the varied application of social media in marketing for different sectors. Primarily focusing on understanding digital consumers, the book integrates social media with marketing and the outcome. It also presents new, selected cases of successful digital companies in emerging markets never before considered. Researchers and managers alike will find this book to be a handy reference guide to social media in emerging markets.

Part IConceptual Issues in Social Media

© The Author(s) 2018

Githa Heggde and G. Shainesh (eds.)Social Media Marketinghttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-5323-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. How Social Media Will Impact Marketing Media

Jagdish N. Sheth¹

(1)

Goizueta Business School, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA

Keywords

Word of mouth (WOM)Social mediaMarketing mediaSocial media addictionTraditional media

The author is grateful to Racchit Thapliyal for his excellent research and editing assistance for this paper.

End Abstract

Introduction

The world is changing; technology is ubiquitous and it is impacting society with each rapid change it undergoes itself. A few decades ago, television was the most exciting technological development, and it transformed society in an unprecedented manner. Today, we’re seeing a similar transformation via the Internet and the rise of social media. In fact, social media is poised to transform society in an even more fundamental manner.

It is easy to underestimate the true disruptive potential of social media, a moving target which is hard to pin down due to constant innovation. For example, as a consequence of the widespread adoption of social media, the distinction between the public and private spheres of life is quickly eroding. Whether one is a CEO, the president of a country, a member of the British royalty, or a commoner, everything about one is on social media: personal information, likes and dislikes, and other mundane activities. In fact, everything said or done is now a matter of public record, and nothing can remain hidden anymore. Besides the doom and gloom surrounding social media because of this lack of privacy, however, there is a bright side as well: social media has led to a drastic increase in transparency in society.

The focus of this paper is on the impact of social media on marketing media. Traditional media, consisting of print, radio and television, offer what can be called a shotgun approach: they represent one to many (passive communication ). Therefore, in order to achieve efficiency and effectiveness, segmentation, targeting and positioning strategies are utilized. Social media, on the other hand, are interactive in nature: they represent peer to peer relationships, or what is referred to as many to many (active communication). Additionally, since word of mouth (WOM) is so crucial in marketing, the paper will also discuss how traditional WOM influence will change dramatically in the world of social media.

Social Media: Platforms and Use

Social media is a blur of “likes,” tweets, shares, posts and content (Bullas, 2014). Its use is not limited to youth. Rather, it is universal and embedded in every corner of the web. The numbers are staggering: 72 percent of the all Internet users are now active on social media (Bullas, 2014). Eighty-nine percent of people eighteen to twenty-nine years of age use social media. Eighty-two percent of people thirty to forty-nine years of age are active on social media. Sixty-five percent of those fifty to sixty-four years of age use social media, while, of those over sixty-five years of age, 49 percent are active users (Pew Research, 2014). It is clear that regardless of their age, people are now spending a lot of time on social media, constantly sharing and browsing information.

When it comes to geography, it is US citizens who top the list of time spent on social media with sixteen minutes per hour spent on the Internet. Australians follow them with fourteen minutes and Britons with thirteen minutes (Experian, 2013). The use of mobile technology to access social media is also increasing rapidly, with 71 percent of the users of social media using mobile devices to access it (Bullas, 2014) (Fig. 1.1).

Fig. 1.1

The growth of social media (Data source: www.​jeffbullas.​com)

Currently, Facebook is the “biggest kid” on the social media block, with 1.49 billion Facebook users (Statista, 2015) and more than 100,000 web pages are accessed with the Login with Facebook feature (Lafferty, 2014). Twenty-three percent of Facebook users login at least five times a day (Romeri, 2014). Facebook also has a lot of influence on the buying decisions of customers, as 47 percent of Americans say that Facebook is the number-one influencer of their purchasing habits (Romeri, 2014). Since Facebook has so much influence on people, it isn’t surprising that 94 percent of business-to-consumer (B2C) marketers and 82 percent of business-to-business (B2B) marketers today use Facebook for customer acquisition (Stelzner, 2014).

But Facebook isn’t the only large player in the social media space, as there are a number of other platforms that are quickly amassing users. For instance, Twitter, which took the social media world by storm with its 140-character limit, now has almost a billion registered users (Koetsier, 2013) and 316 million monthly active users (Twitter, 2015). As is the case with Facebook, where people spend their time, marketers are soon to follow, and 34 percent of marketers use Twitter to generate leads (Bullas, 2014).

Other popular social media platforms include WhatsApp, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, Vine, Tumblr, and SlideShare. With their impressive user base, these platforms are also gaining more and more attention from marketers.

Word of Mouth (WOM) Versus Social Media WOM

What follows is a discussion of the WOM phenomenon in both its traditional context and on social media. Specifically, the emergence of WOM, its impact on marketing, and other characteristics are considered in both contexts (Table 1.1).

Table 1.1

Characteristics of traditional WOM vs. social media WOM

Traditional WOM	Social media WOM
Local	Global
Voice	Text and video
Gated community	Viral
Trickle down (Opinion leadership)	Circular (Network effect)
Passive recipient	Interactive recipient
Marketer in charge (targeting)	Recipient in charge (shot gun)
Episodic feedback	Continuous feedback
Brand Stewardship	Brand alteration
Measurable impact	Diffused impact

Emergence of WOM

The origin of WOM communication can be traced to the origin of trade itself. It was most powerful in the agricultural age, when the producer and consumer interacted closely. The milkman who delivered milk to one’s home, the butcher who delivered fresh meat daily, and the grocery store delivery person knew everything about their consumer families and their preferences.

The services they provided were characterized by much more than a mere transaction of goods. Family customers confided in these goods and services providers, who knew the family dynamics, and were even privy to the family’s finances. In fact, the grocery storeowner often acted as a money lender to the family if they didn’t have money to pay for the groceries at the end of the month. This financing service would be underwritten in the “good name” of the family, something akin to the modern credit score. This was a multigenerational relationship, with the children continuing to avail themselves of such services and even taking up unpaid family debts.

With the dawn of the industrial age, however, came the separation of production from consumption, and the rise of middlemen and trading. As a result, the economy became more transactional as opposed to relational, as it had been in the past (Sheth & Parvatiyar, 1995).

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