Comprehensive Analysis of Social Media Marketing for Businesses

This report provides a comprehensive analysis of social media marketing, exploring its benefits and drawbacks for businesses. It begins by defining social media marketing and highlighting its role in enhancing brand awareness and customer loyalty. The report then delves into various aspects of social media marketing, including strategies for interacting with customers, collecting data, and targeting specific demographics. Several case studies are presented, such as the fast-food industry's use of Facebook in Egypt and the tourism industry's adoption of mobile social media. The report also addresses potential drawbacks, such as privacy concerns and the time-consuming nature of managing social media. The conclusion emphasizes the need for effective social media marketing policies, offering solutions to mitigate the disadvantages and maximize the advantages of social media marketing. Finally, the report includes an appendix discussing Turnitin, a plagiarism detection tool, outlining its benefits and drawbacks.

Running head: SOCIAL MEDIA 0
Language and Learning in Your Discipline

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Introduction
Social media marketing is a modern approach of marketing product or services using social
media sites. It is a popular method of marketing, since more than 88 percent of companies use
social media marketing worldwide. The popularity of social media sites has grown rapidly in
the previous decade, especially in between younger generations. Many companies use this
opportunity to expand their brand awareness and market their products to a larger audience.
This report focuses on determining the benefits of social media marketing from the
perspective of different companies. Further, the report will analyse several drawbacks of
social media marketing and provide solutions for such problems.

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Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing help organisations to improve their brand awareness and assist in
building brand loyalty, between customers. As per Bija and Balas (2014) research, the social
media marketing strategy can be used by corporations to improve their brand awareness. The
research provided that, manufacturing enterprises did not use social media marketing as much
as other corporations. It is important for companies to interact with their audiences to
effectively implement a successful strategy. To improve brand image companies are required
to plan their strategies and set objectives. The research showed the need for interaction with
customers in order for the high brand image. Corporations are required to get feedback, solve
quarries and provided offers to their customers on social media sites. Collecting data from
surveys on social media sites can benefit enterprises in product development process. The
firms are required to analyse their audience preferences such as Facebook or twitter, and use
such platform to advertise and interact with their customers.
Social media marketing can augment the sale figures of an industry by focusing the
advertisement on their target demographic. Gaber and Wright (2014) conducted research on
the use of Facebook by the fast food industry in Egypt, which provided that fast food industry
in Egypt uses social media marking in order to augment their sales and researching their
customer’s requirement. The research provided that a large number of Egyptians uses social
media sites, especially Facebook to interact with their favorite fast food chains. There are
more than 15 million active Facebook users, mostly amongst the age of 15 to 29 years. Fast
food chains such as McDonalds Egypt, KFC Arabia, and Just Falafel uses social media sites
to market their product advertise their offers and interact with customers. The research also
analyses the customer's attitude towards online advertising and the results were positive.
Most of the user does not mind online advertisements since they have the options to either
click on them or not. But the research also provided that most young people think online
advertisements are irrelevant and not credible, but the overall attitude of users was positive
towards social media advertisement.
According to Minazzi (2015), the use of social media marking has significantly improved the
services of social media marketing. The research was focused on ascertaining the impact of
Mobile Social Media (MSM) over the tourism industry. Modern innovation allows users to
improve their experience while traveling such as the use of smartphone allows users to

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translate different languages by pointing their smartphone’s camera to them. The
advancement in augmented reality allows users to interact with 3D models of the product
before taking the decision for purchasing them. Travel companies use data from social media
sites to determine their customers’ requirements. For example, social media sites such as
Foursquare and Facebook Places allow the user to share their locations, which can be
analysed by companies to determine their customer’s morning coffee routine or which
restaurant they go often. This data allows companies, such as Yelp and TripAdvisor, to
provided offer based on their customer’s requirements. Another example is airline
companies; they allow their customers to book a flight or check in flights by using their
smartphones.
Social media marketing is a valuable tool for companies to advertise and interact with a large
number of audiences. The research of Whiting and Deshpande (2014) provided that, social
media assist enterprises in maintaining a positive relationship with their customers. The
research analyses Starbucks’ social media marketing strategy to understand the requirements
of effective social media policy. Starbucks constantly interact with their customers and share
their posts, regarding their positive opinion about the brand. The company uses social media
sites to promote offers and new product launches, to their customers. They initiate several
campaigns which allow customers to be a part of company’s decision-making process, such
as My Starbucks Idea.
There are several risks of implementing social media marketing strategy in business, such as
privacy invasion, legislative issues and low quality of survey data. Bija and Balas (2014)
provided that there is a risk of invasion of customer’s privacy in online marketing due to
hackers. According to Whiting and Deshpande (2014), social media marketing is a time and
money consuming process. Constant monitoring of social media sites is necessary to improve
its efficiency. The data collected from social media sites lack reliability and quality according
to Gaber and Wright (2014).

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Conclusion
From the above report, it is concluded that an effective social media marketing policy is
required in modern enterprises. It allows them to interact with customers, collect data, reach a
broader audience and create a positive brand image. The companies can implement different
measure to avoid the disadvantages of social media marketing. Use of better antivirus
software and firewall help organisations avoiding privacy invasion of customer’s data. To
improve the data quality of survey, the enterprise should focus their surveys on specific
customers and avoid collecting data straight from social media sites. The corporations should
also employ a dedicated manager to take full advantage of social media marketing. An
effective strategy can augment the profits of an organisation using social media marketing
policy.

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References
Ali, H.I.H., 2013. Minimizing cyber-plagiarism through Turnitin: faculty’s & students’
perspectives. International Journal of Applied Linguistics and English Literature, 2(2),
pp.33-42.
Bija, M. and Balas, R., 2014. Social Media Marketing to Increase Brand Awareness. Journal
of Economics and Business Research, pp. 155-164.
Buckley, E. and Cowap, L., 2013. An evaluation of the use of Turnitin for electronic
submission and marking and as a formative feedback tool from an educator's
perspective. British Journal of Educational Technology, 44(4), pp.562-570.
Gaber, H. R. and Wright, L. T., 2014. Fast-food advertising in social media. A case study on
Facebook in Egypt. Journal of Business and Retail Management Research (JBRMR), vol. 9
Issue 1.
Heckler, N.C., Rice, M. and Hobson Bryan, C., 2013. Turnitin systems: A deterrent to
plagiarism in college classrooms. Journal of Research on Technology in Education, 45(3),
pp.229-248.
Minazzi, R., 2015. Social media marketing in tourism and hospitality. Springer iInternational
Publishing. pp. 127-135.
Trudo, R., 2015. Plagiarism, Anti-Plagiarism, and Lumosity Brain Trainer. Idanti Blog.
Retrieved from < http://idanti-plagiarism.blogspot.in/2015/12/turnitin-advantages-and-
disadvantages.html >
Whiting, A. and Deshpande, A., 2014. Social Media Marketing: A Myth or a Necessity.
Journal of Applied Business and Economic,. vol. 16(5), pp. 74-82.

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Appendix
Turnitin
Turnitin is an internet service for plagiarism avoidance in essays and reports. It was started in
1997, by iParagigms, LLC. Usually, the universities and schools buy Turnitin license which
allows their students to check the originality of their assignments before submitting. It assists
students in avoiding plagiarism and improves their assignment’s quality. The service of
Turnitin is used by more than 30 million students and 15 thousand institutes. There are
several benefits along with drawbacks of using Turnitin as a plagiarism check (Trudo 2015).
The benefits of Turnitin service are that it allows users to check plagiarism in their
assignment. It has a significantly large data base as compared to other services, such as Viper
or Grammarly. It helps teachers to reduce grading time and increases the quality of feedback.
It also provides its users free training to understand its functions (Heckler, Rice and Hobson
Bryan 2013).
According to Ali (2013), the drawbacks of Turnitin are that it gives high plagiarism rating if
long quotes are used by students in their projects. It does not evaluate the authenticity of
citation styles used by students in their projects, such as APA or Harvard. It can confuse the
original idea of writing to other similar idea and consider it as plagiarism. Despite its
shortcomings, it is still an essential tool for universities and schools for analysing originality
of student’s assignments (Buckley and Cowap 2013).