Digital Social Media Practices of Amazon and its Competitors

This report covers the usage of digital social media in online retailing. It includes a literature review on digital social media and its impact on marketing. The report discusses Amazon’s digital social media practices and its primary competitors' digital social media practices. It also aims to determine the scope of improvement as per the conducted analysis. The report is relevant for IT managers and students studying digital marketing and online retailing.

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Information Technology for Managers

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Table of Contents
1.0 Introduction................................................................................................................................3
2.0 Literature review........................................................................................................................3
Digital Social Media....................................................................................................................3
3.0 Other online retailers.................................................................................................................6
a. Digital social medial practices of Alibaba Group.................................................................6
b. Digital social media practices of eBay.................................................................................7
4.0....................................................................................................................................................8
a. Description of organization......................................................................................................8
b. Digital Social Media practices of Amazon..............................................................................8
c. Additional digital social media practices.................................................................................9
5.0 Conclusion...............................................................................................................................10
6.0 References................................................................................................................................12

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1.0 Introduction
This report will cover various aspects of usage of digital social media. Digital media strategies
are trending form of promotional and marketing tools. On the other hand, users of digital social
media have been increased rapidly in past few years. Thus, organizations have shifted their
interest towards digital platforms of marketing and promotion as these mediums are capable
enough to cover large part of the target market at once. This report will focus over the
functionalities of Amazon Inc. which is one of the largest online retailers across the globe.
Amazon’s digital social media practices will be discussed. Along with this, literature review on
digital social media will also be discussed in this report in relevance with the online retailers.
Further, report will aim to determine Amazon’s primary competitors and their digital social
media practices so that the gap could be identified between Amazon’s and its competitors’ digital
social media practices. Next part of the report will include discussion of the organization and
their digital social media strategies will also be discussed. This will help to determine the scope
of improvement as per the conducted analysis. On the basis of this analysis, appropriate digital
social media practices will be implemented in order to enhance organizational performance.
2.0 Literature review
Digital Social Media
In today’s technology driven world, social marketing websites have acquired an effective place
where retailers are easily approaching to its target audience. Retailers are also extending their
marketing campaigns which are ultimately enhancing organizational effectiveness. According to
Lamberton & Stephen (2016), social marketing is a connection between consumers and brands as
company could get in touch with the consumers directly. With the emergence of social media,
tools for communication between an organization and consumers have been changed greatly;
therefore, it is necessary for the business enterprises to determine the effective ways through
which available social media tools could be utilised in an optimum manner. Business plan is a
blue print of organizational functionalities which includes plans, policies, strategies and a
marketing plan for the objective of promoting organizational products and services. Before
evaluation of social media marketing channels, organizations were using traditional methods of

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marketing such as television, radio, newspaper, bill boards, etc. With the effect of social media
marketing has generated consistent and positive outcomes for the organization and it has been
the major part of marketing as well as business plan. Social media is being used from the
introduction of a new business or new product in new or in existing market to its brand
promotion, marketing, and to the development of an effective position amongst the target
audience (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015).
Social media marketing has been an effective medium in terms of attainment of competitive
advantage; although, it is necessary to set all the marketing channels in appropriate hierarchical
manner through which positive outcomes could be attained. Further, it is also necessary to
evaluate the marketing conditions of a particular market so that appropriate marketing tool could
be implemented. For example, Amazon Inc. is planning to reach to the rural areas and to spread
awareness amongst the rural areas regarding the concept of online shopping as well as to educate
them with the advantages of online shopping, organization requires to implement their plan with
traditional marketing channels such as television, radio, newspaper, etc. because users of social
media users are limited in rural areas. Before using social media tool as a marketing strategy, it is
must for the retailer to understand every aspect of it. As per Tiago & Veríssimo (2014), social
media as “group of internet based applications which are built on the ideological and
technological foundations and these platforms allow the creation and exchange of user generated
content”. Digital social media is a part of digital marketing strategy and it has been in trend in
the last couple of years. These platforms are mainly used by new generation and the famous
social media platforms are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, etc. New generation people
have shifted towards online platforms for shopping, communicating as well as for socialising.
Thus, social marketing has acquired an effective place in digital marketing plan.

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(Source: Reliablesoft.net, 2018)
Above figure shows the number of active users on social media platforms and amongst the all
platforms, Facebook has the highest number of active users across the globe. According to a
research in approximately 7.6 billion people’s world, every fourth person i.e. approximately 2.25
billion people are using or had ever used Facebook. Amongst the number of online marketing
channels, social media marketing is one of the most effective and efficient tool of marketing and
promotion (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2016).
Stephen (2016) have researched about the impact of social media platforms and they have found
that utilising social media tools for promoting online as well as offline products is useful as it a
cheap medium in comparison to the traditional methods of marketing channels and these
platforms have huge reachability in comparison to the other modes of marketing and promotional
channels. Digital social media is fast way to spread the word, trending method in marketing and
promotional campaigns, most appropriate method to interact with customers directly which
ultimately helps the organization to analyse their target consumers’ demands and wants through

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which the desired goals could easily be accomplished (Leeflang, Verhoef, Dahlström & Freundt,
2014).
(Source: reliablesoft.net, 2018)
Although, social media marketing tools does not have much effectiveness in comparison to other
digital marketing tools such as search engines like Google, Bing, etc. But still, it is the most
trending method through which organization could easily approach to their target audience along
with successful marketing and promotion of their products and services.
Amazon Inc. is one of the biggest online retailers across the globe and with millions of products
in almost category; organization has acquired an effective brand image in the target audience’s
mind-sets. Amazon’s marketing and promotional campaigns also include social media marketing
on the top of the list (Kannan, 2017). Amazon uses almost social media marketing tools such as
Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc. and all these tools have their own significance along with
the unique set of target audience. Concerning to this, organization has been able to accomplish

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its goals and objectives with regards to the promotion of their products and services in the global
market which ultimately results in generating demand amongst the target audience (Sunstein,
2018).
3.0 Other online retailers
Amazon Inc. is a multinational corporation engaged in various activities such as media,
electronics and other merchandise. In all these segments, organization has established its
effective place along with acquiring sufficient market share. It is the largest e-commerce
company in terms of market capitalisation and revenues and with millions of products and
services, organization has developed its effective place in the customer’s mind-sets along with
gaining competitive advantage in the target market (Ritala, Golnam & Wegmann, 2014).
Primary competitors of Amazon in terms of online retailing are Alibaba Group and eBay. Both
the companies are performing significantly well in the international market. Alibaba Group
Holding Limited is a Chinese multinational e-commerce and retailing company founded in 1999.
Alibaba is also engaged in various sectors through which their brand value is quite huge in
comparison to both the companies; thus, it is names as world’s most admired companies by
Fortune. Alibaba operates in more than 200 countries and this has made the company to stand on
the peak position as the largest retailer across the globe. Alibaba’s overall online sales and
profitability surpassed all US retailers’ sales and profits which include eBay, Amazon, and
Walmart (Chang & Allen, 2016).
Apart from Alibaba Group, eBay is another multinational online retailing brand founded in 1995
and serving in both consumer to consumer, and in business consumer market. As of 2011,
company was operating in approximately 30 countries. Functionalities of eBay are quite unique
and different from both Amazon and Alibaba Group as it provides a platform to both sellers as
well as to buyers in terms of buying and selling wide variety of goods and services across the
globe. With regards to this, organization does not charge any kind of fee from its buyers but
sellers needs to pay for availing the services of eBay (Miguel & Casado, 2016).

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a. Digital social medial practices of Alibaba Group
Alibaba Group offers wholesale platform to small buyers seeking for fast shipment of bulk
quantities of goods on global site. Along with this, organization also offers business management
software and internet infrastructure services to consumers. In terms of promoting its products and
services, Alibaba Group expands its new markets by freebies. They offer freebies in order to
attract clients so that they could use Alibaba as an online marketing platform. Apart from this,
organization also promotes its products and services through internet promotional strategies such
as public relations, discounts on certain items on special occasions like festivals, direct
marketing, and sponsoring events and by direct marketing. These strategies are main elements of
organizational marketing campaign and these elements helps the organization to promote their
products and services along with generating demand amongst them regarding their products and
services (Vertical Web Media LLC., 2018).
Alibaba started Taobao mobile application as an independent platform for buyers to buy in bulk
quantity. Along with this, organization is also concerned towards attracting young people and for
the same, they mainly social features. In order to engage the customers with company, they have
used social and entertainment features in their mobile application with the objective of
generating demand amongst the customers. This strategy has helped the organization to engage
customers on their application which resulted that on an average approximately 7 customer visits
application for more than 25 minutes in a day while customers spend 9 minutes on Amazon.
Organizational marketing campaign also includes digital social media strategies and these
platforms are the primary sources for attracting young people. Company has spent billions of
dollars for purchasing video website Youku Tudou, UC Web browser and an effective social
media platform like Twitter i.e. Weibo for enhancing customers’ interaction with company.
Organization has also invested $200 million in Snapchat promotions and it is helping
organization to engage young users with the company (Jia, Kenney, Mattila & Seppala, 2018).
b. Digital social media practices of eBay
eBay, Amazon and Alibaba mainly operates through internet and with regards to this, it is
necessary for them to use platforms for marketing and promotion which are linked with internet
in order to gain positive results. Although, these companies integrate both offline and online
marketing channels in order to gain higher outcomes but online mediums carry higher weightage

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in comparison to the offline marketing channels. With regards to this, eBay’s digital social media
platforms are quite similar to the Amazon as both the companies are from US and there
approximately, 76% people uses social media and 89% of businesses saw increased market
exposure due to effective utilisation of social media platforms. Apart from this, 71% of
consumers refer social media to make purchase from the online platforms (eBay Inc., 2018).
(Source: eBay Inc., 2018).
With regards to this, eBay mainly use Facebook, Twitter, Blogs and YouTube to approach to the
target customer segments. Along with social media strategies, organization also uses integrated
marketing communication to stay connected with their target markets. This coordinates
promotional elements, personnel selling, publicity, public relations, direct marketing, and sales
promotion. In order to promote organizational products and services, organization uses digital
marketing, online marketing and web marketing as the main elements for their promotional and
marketing campaign. Their campaign also includes email marketing and wireless marketing
channels.
Digital social media marketing is the main component of internet market and this helps the
organization to spread awareness amongst the target audience effectively along with gaining
positive outcomes. Every new update or information is quickly shared through social media
channels related to the new offers, discounts on special occasions like festivals, introduction of
new products and services, etc. amongst the target audience. This also helps the organization to
develop an effective relationship with the customers which ultimately helps in developing

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reliability amongst the customers for the organization. Apart from this, main advantage of using
digital social media channels for the objective of marketing and promotion is that these platforms
are cost effective and higher result oriented. In a very low cost, organization could easily transact
with large number of customers at one time which generates positive outcomes for the
organization such as generating demand amongst customers, spreading awareness amongst the
customers, etc. (Matthews, 2017).
4.0
a. Description of organization
Amazon Inc. is an online retailer; although, organization has also started opening certain brick-
and-mortar stores. It was founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos and its headquarters is situated in
Seattle, Washington. Company has acquired leading position in the global market in terms of
revenues and market capitalisation. Company stands after Alibaba Group in terms of total sales.
Initially, organization was started as an online bookstore and later on company diversified its
product offerings by selling MP3, audiobooks, software, video games, electronics, furniture,
apparel, toys, jewellery, etc. Now company has its production of certain electronic items such as
Kindle e-readers, Fire tablets, Echo and Fire TV. Amazon is now one of the largest providers of
cloud infrastructure services across the globe. Few years back, Amazon has also started selling
low-end-products as “AmazonBasics” (Amazon Inc., 2018).
It operates in more than 188 countries across the globe and it has 12 registered offices in
different countries. Along with this, company also operates with separate websites in different
countries like for United States, United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Canada, Japan, Spain, Italy,
Australia, China, India, etc. In 2016, organization launched several other version of their German
website in Dutch, Polish, and Turkish languages. Apart from this, organization also supports
international shopping for some of its products in some countries where company is not yet
present. Company became the most valuable retailer in the United States in terms of market
capitalisation in 2015 after surpassing Walmart. Amazon is now the fourth most valuable public
company across the globe after Apple, Alphabet, and Microsoft. Along with this, organization
becomes the largest internet retailer in the globe in terms of revenues after Walmart and the
second largest employer in the United States. Recently in 2017, organization acquired Whole

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Foods Market for $13.4 billion and this has increased the organizational presence as brick-and-
mortar retailer (Etail, 2018).
b. Digital Social Media practices of Amazon
Amazon has 310 million active Amazon customer accounts across the globe and amongst these
users, 90 million are Amazon Prime Users and their spending are on an average $1300 per year
and rest 220 million users spend approximately $700 per year. Amazon has adopted unique and
trending measures of digital social media in terms of promoting its products and services along
with approaching to its customers in an effective manner. Along with this, it is essential for the
organization to enhance its sales, revenues and the profitability. With regards to this,
organization promotes its products and services through various social networks to mainly target
young users as they prefer online shopping and they mostly refer social media for purchasing on
internet platforms. With the help of social media marketing, organization is able to driver more
sales than other online retailers (Järvinen & Karjaluoto, 2015). Some of the majorly used social
media platforms by Amazon are:
 Facebook: Currently, Amazon has nearly 28.7 million likes on their Facebook page.
Although, this figure looks incredible and the major reason behind their popularity is the
approach adopted by them. Amazon is one of the largest customer centric company
across the globe and they replies to every customer which are posted on their page. The
replies from organization are clear, polite and with useful information through which
customer’s queries could be resolved. Ultimately, it helps the organization to develop an
effective and reliable image amongst the users (Mediakix, 2018).
 Twitter: Amazon is less concentrating on promotions through Twitter and now company
use this platform to drive their 2.7 million followers on Twitter towards their other
services such as Amazon Prime Video and Amazon Music. Along with this, company
also use their Twitter handle for promoting company’s blog content and for spreading
awareness amongst the users in relevance with innovations of the company and
regarding other updates (Vugec, Spremić & Bach, 2018).
 Pinterest: It is essentially extension for their primary online store. This social media site
is used by significant number of users who browse for gathering sufficient information
for purchasing ideas. In this site, when users find pin from Amazon, they could simply

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click on it and this will take the users towards Amazon’s website from which users could
easily purchase their required products directly.
 Spark: Amazon has gone so far for promoting its products and services as well as to
approach to larger segment of their target audience. With relevance to this, Amazon has
recently launched its own Instagram/Pinterest-like Amazon Spark and it could be
described as a unique social networking especially built for shopping. The primary
purpose of this application is to create social engagement of consumers with the
consumers which will directly lead them towards the product purchases (Chaffey, 2015).
 Final word: Amazon has always believed in engaging community even before the
advent of social media platforms. But after extensive use of social media and with
increasing users of social media, organization uses Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and now
its own Amazon Spark to promote their products and services in the market along with
facilitating communication, engagement and discovery amongst its millions of followers.
c. Additional digital social media practices
As Amazon is already promoting its products and services through various social media
channels; thus, there are not much options left which could also be adopted for enhancing
organizational social media practices. From the available options and from the analysis of
company’s competitors’ social media practices, organization could adopt Tumblr and Snapchat
in order to make expand their social media practices.
 Tumblr: It is a microblogging and social networking website introduced in 2007 by
David Karp and it is now owned by Oath Inc. This platform allows its users to post
multimedia and other content in short form as blog. Users could follow other user’s
blog which is same alike Twitter. This site also provides option to bloggers to mark
their account as private and after the second quarter of 2018, Tumblr hosts over 417.1
million blogs while in January 2016; website of Tumblr had only 555 million visitors
(Karjaluoto, Mustonen & Ulkuniemi, 2015). With the help of this platform, Amazon
could promote its products and services in the target market along with enhancing their
approachability in the target market. The more options will company have, the more
chances will be originated for organization in terms of enhancing their customer base.
This social network website is not much popular as other social networking platforms

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and in June 2012; it featured its first major brand advertising campaign for Adidas and
this helped Tumblr to gain more number of users and with regards to this, organization
moved towards paid advertising on their site. With the help of this social networking
site, Amazon would be able to target more consumers along with enhancing the
customer engagement (Fuchs, 2018).
 Snapchat: It is another multimedia messaging application introduced in 2011 and now
it is also one of great measures of social media platforms. Primary reason for which this
social media marketing tool could be adopted is that company’s primary competitor i.e.
Alibaba Group has recently invested $200 million on Snapchat’s promotions. This will
help Amazon to compete with Alibaba Group in an effective manner along with
enhancing customer engagement with the company. This application is bit unique from
other social media platforms. Snapchat’s core principal concept is that messages and
pictures are available only for short time before they become unapproachable. It has
become a new and mobile-first direction for social media which significantly emphasis
on user’s interaction with virtual stickers and augmented reality objects. As of February
2018; Snapchat had 187 million daily active users worldwide. Thus, Amazon could
also adopt this social media practice for making their social media practices more
effective (Ryan, 2016).
5.0 Conclusion
From the aforesaid discussion, it can be concluded that digital social media is an effective
channel for company. It is utilised by an organisation to improve its performance and pull the
attention of large number of customers. It can be summarised that there are different digital
media practices used by Alibaba group such as Youku Tudou, UC Web browser and Snapchat
and the social emdia practices used by eBay are quite similar to the Amazon’s digital social
media practices. With regards to this, it could be said that online retailing mainly focuses on
social media promotion in order to attract customer interaction so that they could be able to
enhance their customer base, revenues and profitability. All these three companies are
established in same era when internet was just introduced. Amazon has attained huge success
from the utilisation of these platforms. Apart from this, Amazon’s customer centric approach has
also helped the organization to develop their positive image in the international retailing

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industry. This report has evaluated various aspects and platforms of social media practises along
with their utilisation for acquiring desired goals and objectives. The last part of the report has
concluded additional digital social media practices for enhancing effectiveness of Amazon’s
marketing and promotional campaigns.

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6.0 References
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utm_source=gateway&utm_medium=footer.
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politics of social media in the United States. American Ethnologist, 42(1), 4-17.
Chaffey, D. (2015). Digital business and e-commerce management. Pearson Education Limited.
Chang, W. L., & Allen, T. J. (2016). Amazon and Alibaba: Competition in a Dynamic
Environment. In Workshop on E-Business (pp. 29-53). Springer, Cham.
eBay Inc. (2018). Social Media. Retrieved from: https://pages.ebay.com/seller-center/listing-and-
marketing/social-media.html.
Etail. (2018). How Amazon Inspires Buyers to Drive Social Media Revenue. Retrieved from:
https://etaileast.wbresearch.com/amazons-engaged-buyers-drive-social-media-revenue.
Fuchs, C. (2018). Social Media and the Capitalist Crisis. The Media and Austerity: Comparative
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Järvinen, J., & Karjaluoto, H. (2015). The use of Web analytics for digital marketing
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Jia, K., Kenney, M., Mattila, J., & Seppala, T. (2018). The Application of Artificial Intelligence
at Chinese Digital Platform Giants: Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent.
Kannan, P. K. (2017). Digital marketing: A framework, review and research
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Kaplan, A. M., & Haenlein, M. (2016). Higher education and the digital revolution: About
MOOCs, SPOCs, social media, and the Cookie Monster. Business Horizons, 59(4), 441-450.

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Karjaluoto, H., Mustonen, N., & Ulkuniemi, P. (2015). The role of digital channels in industrial
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Lamberton, C., & Stephen, A. T. (2016). A thematic exploration of digital, social media, and
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Leeflang, P. S., Verhoef, P. C., Dahlström, P., & Freundt, T. (2014). Challenges and solutions
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Matthews. A. (2017). How eBay uses social media to create customer service experiences that
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Miguel, J. C., & Casado, M. Á. (2016). GAFAnomy (Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple):
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Stephen, A. T. (2016). The role of digital and social media marketing in consumer
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Sunstein, C. R. (2018). # Republic: Divided democracy in the age of social media. Princeton
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Tiago, M. T. P. M. B., & Veríssimo, J. M. C. (2014). Digital marketing and social media: Why
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Vertical Web Media LLC. (2018). Alibaba's e-commerce app grows with strong social
engagement. Retrieved from: https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/2016/08/22/alibabas-e-
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Vugec, D. S., Spremić, M., & Bach, M. P. (2018). Integrating Digital Transformation Strategies
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