Analysis of Social Media Usage in Marketing: A Comprehensive Report

This report provides a structured abstract analyzing the use of social media in marketing activities, drawing upon the work of various researchers such as Hollebeek, Glynn, and Brodie; Perrin; Ruths and Pfeffer; and Trainor, Andzulis, Rapp, and Agnihotri. It explores the evolution of social media's role in branding, customer relationship building, and understanding consumer behavior. The report identifies common themes across the research, such as the importance of customer engagement, and discusses differing perspectives on social media usage among various demographics. It also addresses study limitations, including data comparability issues and the need for more comprehensive analysis from both consumer and producer viewpoints. The report concludes with suggestions for future research directions, emphasizing the need for both qualitative and quantitative analysis to provide a clearer picture of social media's impact on marketing, and stresses the importance of considering both consumer and producer perspectives for effective marketing strategies. References to the research papers are provided.

Running head: USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN MARKETING
Use of Social Media in marketing
Name of the Student
Name of University
Author note

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USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN MARKETING
Table of Contents
Assessment 1: Structured Abstract..................................................................................................2
Brief summary of the theory ad progression in the field.................................................................2
Discussion of common themes........................................................................................................3
Discussion of different themes........................................................................................................4
Discussion of study limitations........................................................................................................4
Discussion of future research directions..........................................................................................5

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Assessment 1: Structured Abstract
The following structured abstract analyses the social media usage in the marketing
activities of the company. The topic will be analyzed using the past work of using the work of
Trainor, Andzulis, Rapp and Agnihotri, Hollebeek, Glynn and Brodie, Perrin, Ruths and Pfeffer.
Brief summary of the theory ad progression in the field
Hollebeek, Glynn, and Brodie has conducted a research in 2014 on the effectiveness of
branding relationships. Hollebeek, Glynn, and Brodie have highlighted the engagement between
the consumer and the related brands. Hollebeek, Glynn, and Brodie have shown the drop of
traditional mean of advertising an increasing use of social media in creating an effecting brand
recognition and relation. Perrin in his work conducted in 2015, shows that nearly two third of the
adult in America is prone to social media usage in 2005. Since then the usage of this medium of
advertising has been increasing and it has reached a level of 65 percent. He has further discussed
that the use of social media has affected the communication, advertising and branding patterns
around the globe.
Ruths and Pfeffer on the other hand have used social media to study the behavior of
humans and its effects on the branding strategy of the company. The existence of powerful
computational resources along with strong database has helped in giving rise to effective
machine learning. The study of human behavior through social media has helped in learning the
trends in people and targets the customers on a specific basis. Social media has thus offered a
platform to the company to learn about the human behavior and strategizing their marketing
strategy accordingly.

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Trainor, Andzulis, Rapp, and Agnihotri in their paper have discussed about the usage of
social media in creating a customer centric management by the company. This contributes
effectively on the company’s customer relationship building. In their paper they have focused on
two broad concept used in marketing such as customer centric management and use of social
media.
Discussion of common themes
Hollebeek, Glynn, and Brodie and Trainor, Andzulis, Rapp, and Agnihotri have shown
similar concepts of social media. Both the papers focused in creating the strong customer
relationship through the usage of social media platform. It has discussed that unlike the
traditional managers that carried out intensive marketing techniques and formula, today’s
managers are just using social media to build customer relationship that is stronger than
traditional marketing strategies. However, according to the finding the efficacy of using social
media as a medium of marketing is still unknown to the companies. The consumers are
increasing the usage of social media to know about the companies and to connect with their
peers.
Perrin on the other hand focused on the usage of social media among the adults for
meeting their daily activities. He has shifted the focus away from the internet users and only on
the adults. Adults are considered as a proportion of internet users and the paper has analyze the
adults that only use internet and did not take into consideration the adult consumers that still
remains offline. He has analyzed the total social media demand among consumers based on
demographic, gender, socio-economic differences, racial differences and community differences.

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Findings have shown that 90 percent of the young adults and 68 percent of the older adults has
been using internet recently.
Discussion of different themes
There has been differences in the work of all the four articles on some ground or the
other. Hollebeek, Glynn, and Brodie and Trainor, Andzulis, Rapp, and Agnihotri have discussed
the usage on social media on building customer relationship by the company. However, the other
two papers have focused only on the increase use of social media among genders and age group.
They have analyzed the ways in which the social media usage is increasing within a particular
age group so that the brand scan creates successful consumer engagement strategy. This is
because with the increasing trend of globalization it has become crucial for the brands to carry
out an effective customer engagement tool.
Ruths and Pfeffer has studied the human behavior and its effect on the social media usage. The
study has been conducted on a large scale basis to study human behavior over all age group.
Study of human behavior is also conducted through social media where the companies are
opening their own online portals and analyzing the comments and perception of people towards
their brands. Perrin (2015) on the other hand has analyzed the behavior of the adults alone in
using social media for doing various activities. He has analyzed the use of social media in 27
national surveys of Americans.
Discussion of study limitations
Ruth and Pfeffer in their article have shown some problems in their research such as mismatch in
the proxy population, incomparability of data and multiple comparisons of the issues. There has

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also been a multiple hypothesis I the paper instead of one single conclusion. On the other hand,
the study conducted by Perrin shows that limitation that the adult population has obtained the
result only about the usage of social media. It failed to analyze the social media usage by all
types of consumers rather than any discrimination based on age and gender.
Hollebeek, Glynn, and Brodie also show some limitation in their work as there is only analysis of
effect of social media on the bard engagement. It has failed to show the usage of social media
from the consumer point of view which leads to an incomplete analysis.
Discussion of future research directions
The papers can be used for further analysis on various grounds in order to give a clear
picture of effect of social media in marketing. Future analysis should be both from consumers
and producers point of view. This is because for effective marketing, it is important to know the
demand of social media from both consumers and producers point of view, as they are both a
crucial part for carrying out marketing successfully. Moreover, both qualitative and quantitative
analysis needs to be done while conducting the research in order to prevent multiple hypothesis
to rise.

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References
Hollebeek, L.D., Glynn, M.S. and Brodie, R.J., 2014. Consumer brand engagement in social
media: Conceptualization, scale development and validation. Journal of interactive
marketing, 28(2), pp.149-165.
Perrin, A., 2015. Social media usage. Pew Research Center.
Ruths, D. and Pfeffer, J., 2014. Social media for large studies of behavior. Science, 346(6213),
pp.1063-1064.
Trainor, K.J., Andzulis, J.M., Rapp, A. and Agnihotri, R., 2014. Social media technology usage
and customer relationship performance: A capabilities-based examination of social
CRM. Journal of Business Research, 67(6), pp.1201-1208.