Business Research Report: Social Media Marketing Strategies

This business research report delves into the multifaceted impact of social media on contemporary business practices. The report begins by emphasizing the critical role of social media in today's competitive landscape, highlighting its utility in both attracting new customers and fostering brand recognition. It examines how social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn are utilized to build customer relationships, disseminate information about new products and services, and even facilitate recruitment efforts. The report then explores specific marketing strategies, such as enhancing consumer loyalty, gaining insights into customer needs, and targeting relevant audiences through the use of hashtags and platforms like Google+ and Sprout. It also discusses the use of blogs in product marketing and brand image enhancement, as well as the role of social media as a cost-efficient marketing tactic. However, the report also acknowledges the time-intensive nature of social media marketing, the potential for negative brand reputation, and the risks associated with hacking and information security. Furthermore, the report identifies a gap in existing literature, noting a limited focus on the drawbacks of social media and an overemphasis on well-known platforms. The report concludes by summarizing the benefits of social media in boosting sales and brand reputation while emphasizing the need for effective management to mitigate potential risks. The report provides a detailed reference list to support its claims.

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Table of Contents
Introduction......................................................................................................................................2
Discussion........................................................................................................................................2
Social Media Marketing and Improved Consumer Loyalty........................................................3
Gain Insights into Customer Needs.............................................................................................4
Social Media Aids in Targeting Relevant Audience...................................................................5
Use of Blogs in Marketing a Product and Enhancing the Brand Image......................................5
Social Media as a Recruitment Weapon......................................................................................6
Cost-efficient Marketing Tactic...................................................................................................7
Social Media is Time Intensive...................................................................................................7
Social Media as a Cost-Intensive Medium is a Myth..................................................................7
Social Media Sites Often Lead to Negative Reputation..............................................................8
Social Media and Hacking Issues................................................................................................8
Identification of Literature Gap.......................................................................................................8
Conclusion.......................................................................................................................................9
Reference List................................................................................................................................10

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Introduction:
The importance of social media in conducting business in a highly competitive world can
never be overstated. While on the one hand, the efficient use of social media sites such as
Facebook and Instagram help the emerging companies gain recognition amongst the consumers,
it also assists already recognized companies increase their traffic to their official websites. Since
the inception of social media sites, these sites have been utilized by the business organizations to
build relation with the consumers and keep them updated about the new products and services.
However, presently, the advent of professional sites like LinkedIn has also simplified the job of
the Human Resource Managers of an organization, helping them attract talented workforce
without spending huge amount of money or long hours tryng to get in touch with the deserving
employees.
There can be no gain stating the obvious fact that social media marketing is no longer an
optional matter, but an integral marketing strategy. It is indeed an essential way to reach out to
the customers, gain valuable insights about their attitude towards the brand, and build the brand
reputation (Aral et al. 2013). However, despite the potential advantages of social media
marketing, there are certain intricacies of social media marketing which can prove to be hard and
challenging to manage. For example, lack of security on the information shared on these sites,
difficulty in controlling negative feedback of clients, and time-intensive marketing procedure
requires much supervision over the social media activities. Hence, there are both advantages as
well as serious disadvantages behind the use of social media.
Discussion:

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Social Media Marketing and Improved Consumer Loyalty:
One of the principal marketing strategies each organization wishes to incorporate in its
business plan is to attract potential clients as well as to retain the existent customers. However,
most of the companies in today’s world encounter cut-throat competition and find it hard to
retain its clients. Herein lays the importance of social media marketing. According to the survey
report by Sensis, 90% of the Australians belonging to the age group of 18to 39 years have daily
access to the social media sites out of which 95% of them use Facebook on a daily basis (Ngai
et al. 2015). Similarly, research reports also suggest that in Australia, there are approximately
5,000,000 active users of Instagram while as many as 14,800,000 people daily watches videos
on YouTube.
Figure 1: Use of Social Media in Australia, 2017
Source: (Rodriguez et al. 2015)

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It becomes clearly evident that large number of people uses social media and thus
advertising a product on these sites will help in attracting attention of the consumer towards a
new brand or a new offer of an old brand. The use of interesting, emotional and catchy stories in
the form of videos on YouTube can also help the customers become aware of a brand, even
though the consumers themselves may not realize that a brand name was endorsed in the process
of playing the video. Often many companies share pictures of their new products, offer discounts
by engaging consumers who are their followers on these sites and respond to the consumer
grievances and queries via social media sites like Facebook Messenger, Twitter, etc. This form
of continuous interaction with the client helps in building relation with the consumers.
Gain Insights into Customer Needs:
In order to make better business decisions as well as to ensure longer sustainability,
business organizations need to understand the changing needs of the consumers. Each new day,
there are approximately 500 million tweets, 4.5 billion likes on Facebook as well as 95 million
photos posted on Instagram, and a company can easily understand its position in the competitive
market, by analyzing the number of ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ its posts and pictures receive each new
day (Agnihotri et al. 2016). Further, it should be noted that most of the earlier studies have
focused on the benefits of social media tools and have overlooked the significant use of social
media analytic tool like Hootsuite Insights, that help in gauging customer response to these
social sites, as well as critically analyze the interaction of the consumers about the specific
brand over the social media sites (Holt 2016). With the help of prominent graphic visualizations,
this analytical tool helps in informing the company about the changing behavior of the
customers.

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Social Media Aids in Targeting Relevant Audience:
While targeting relevant audience is a matter of primary importance, creating customized
clients and sharing advertisements exclusively with them is important. The use of popular hash
tags on Instagram and Twitter can always attract the relevant audience, for example, #glasses can
help in attracting sunglass consumers. Since the Facebook newsfeed becomes overcrowded with
multiple adverts, organizations seeking immediate consumer attention can also employ the use of
Google+ and Sprout that enable demographic or interest-based audience targeting, which in
turn enhances the visibility of the adverts (Scott 2015).
Use of Blogs in Marketing a Product and Enhancing the Brand Image:
While discussing about social media marketing, it should be noted that most of the
organizations focus on the well-known and most popular social media sites like Facebook and
Twitter. However, many companies fail to develop consumer awareness simply because they
ignore blogs and review sites which also help in enhancing their visibility. This is the reason why
companies, especially the small and emerging ones, which are present on Yelp and Pinterest, are
able to network and promote their business much more effectively (Tuten and Solomon 2014).
Besides, many companies use online blogs to attract strangers, turn them into regular visitors and
ultimately sell them products.

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Figure 2: Diagram Showing how Blogs Work
Source: (Fuchs 2017)
As evident from the above diagram, engaging bloggers to write blogs for a company help
in enhancing the traffic coming to the company website, ultimately helping to convert the traffic
into leads.
Social Media as a Recruitment Weapon:
Although it is less acknowledged a fact, social media does assist an organization attract
talented workforce as well. According to research reports, 61% of the employees use social
media sites to research about a company, and hence the presence of an organization on social
sites helps in creating the employer brand (Treem et al. 2013). Hence, having an established
social media presence is highly important. Besides, needless to state that many potential
employers connect with the suitable and deserving employees via professional social media sites
like LinkedIn.

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Cost-efficient Marketing Tactic:
Endorsing a product or developing the brand image via social sites was never so cheaper
with traditional media such as newspapers or television and radio adverts. According to research
reports, social media sites like Facebook and Google are not only going to overtake a major part
of the TV audience, but also enables business organizations to endorse their products absolutely
at free of cost. Unlike any other media, social media allows an organization reach out to a huge
number of people at once with no cost other than installation of social media sites.
Social Media is Time Intensive:
Although the social media sites have been considered to be efficient tools for marketing,
the use of social media marketing takes a lot of time. In fact, the idea of social media site is
based on two-way communication process (Okazak and Taylor 2013). Hence, a marketing
manager will have to actively monitor the interaction over the sites, respond to each individual
comment, as well as handle customer queries about product information, price details, and others
with much time and patience.
Social Media as a Cost-Intensive Medium is a Myth:
Social media marketing can also get very expensive. First of all, since social media
marketing requires constant engagement with client, it is important to hire at least a couple of
marketing managers who will be entrusted with the duty of sharing posts or responding to
consumer queries. Although content marketing helps a company to increase traffic to its website,
each new day at least 500 new websites are being created writing blogs and articles and
promoting various products. In order to stay in the competition, companies have to spend huge
amount of money for paid advertisements, and as per the recent IZEA survey, 61% of the

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marketers pay a higher amount to an external marketer for promoting their products (Hays et
al. 2013). Opening up an account on these sites is easier, but without paid advertisements,
attracting new consumers is almost impossible.
Social Media Sites Often Lead to Negative Reputation:
Consumer dissatisfaction is not a new issue, and in fact a earlier times also, consumers
used to complaint about the product or service they did not like. However, the problem arises
when these unhappy customers get an opportunity of giving a company one star rating, poor
review openly on the social media sites (Rokka et al. 2014). This negative feedback can instantly
malign the reputation of a company and dissuade its potential customers to stay loyal to the
company. In fact, the negative feedback, information leaks or hacking remain some of the most
potential drawbacks of social media marketing.
Social Media and Hacking Issues:
The social media sites can also prove to be intrusive to the privacy of many companies. A
variety of malware, spyware, adware and ransom ware can lead to hacking issues. In case the
official account of a company is hacked, it can lead to the offensive customer reactions and
failed marketing efforts (Georgescu and Popescul 2015).
Identification of Literature Gap:
Although most of the literary articles and business journals reviewed, state the
importance of the social networking sites in enhancing brand reputation and increasing sales, the
number of research articles discussing the limitations and drawbacks is very limited. Further,
most of the literary articles have primarily focused on the most well-known social media sites

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such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. However, some of the less known social media sites
find no mention here.
Conclusion:
To sum it up, it becomes clearly evident that the social networking sites are of much use
to help a company in its marketing efforts. It is a well-known fact that the social media is critical
to the marketing and customer service success of any organization operating in any part of the
world. Reduction in the price of marketing and promotion, easy access to a larger customer base,
opportunity for direct customer interaction and customer feedback, as well as improved ranking
on search engine websites definitely boost the sales and brand reputation of a company.
However, social media tools used for business must be managed well in order to ensure
marketing success as there are potential drawbacks as well.

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Reference List:
Agnihotri, R., Dingus, R., Hu, M.Y. and Krush, M.T., 2016. Social media: Influencing customer
satisfaction in B2B sales. Industrial Marketing Management, 53, pp.172-180.
Aral, S., Dellarocas, C. and Godes, D., 2013. Introduction to the special issue—social media and
business transformation: a framework for research. Information Systems Research, 24(1), pp.3-
13.
Fuchs, C., 2017. Social media: A critical introduction. Sage.
Georgescu, M. and Popescul, D., 2015. Social Media–the new paradigm of collaboration and
communication for business environment. Procedia Economics and Finance, 20, pp.277-282.
Hays, S., Page, S.J. and Buhalis, D., 2013. Social media as a destination marketing tool: its use
by national tourism organisations. Current issues in Tourism, 16(3), pp.211-239.
Holt, D., 2016. Branding in the age of social media. Harvard business review, 94(3), pp.40-50.
Ngai, E.W., Tao, S.S. and Moon, K.K., 2015. Social media research: Theories, constructs, and
conceptual frameworks. International Journal of Information Management, 35(1), pp.33-44.
Okazaki, S. and Taylor, C.R., 2013. Social media and international advertising: theoretical
challenges and future directions. International marketing review, 30(1), pp.56-71.
Rodriguez, M., Peterson, R.M. and Ajjan, H., 2015. CRM/social media technology: impact on
customer orientation process and organizational sales performance. In Ideas in Marketing:
Finding the New and Polishing the Old(pp. 636-638). Springer, Cham.

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Rokka, J., Karlsson, K. and Tienari, J., 2014. Balancing acts: Managing employees and
reputation in social media. Journal of Marketing Management, 30(7-8), pp.802-827.
Scott, D.M., 2015. The new rules of marketing and PR: How to use social media, online video,
mobile applications, blogs, news releases, and viral marketing to reach buyers directly. John
Wiley & Sons.
Treem, J.W. and Leonardi, P.M., 2013. Social media use in organizations: Exploring the
affordances of visibility, editability, persistence, and association. Annals of the International
Communication Association, 36(1), pp.143-189.
Tuten, T.L. and Solomon, M.R., 2014. Social media marketing. Sage.