Strategic Social Media Marketing

Introduction

In the last decade, consumers have experienced a revolutionary change in the way they gather information about products or services they are interested in, the way they make decisions about current or future purchases, aspirational or ordinary acquisitions, the way they buy, and also the way they provide feedback about their purchases, particularly in online settings.

All organizations aim to gain valuable and mutually beneficial relationships with their internal and external customers, as well as other stakeholders. To this end, one of the many positive characteristics of the online and digital developments has been the opportunity to communicate, interact and better understand with the main targeted groups of an organization. Social media is such a medium that offers a setting for creating a competitive advantage for each type of relationship or targeted audience of an organization.

Social media in the context of online marketing has been a topic that has drawn attention from both academics, and practitioners. There are many research articles that have examined social media marketing from different perspectives that reflect the many purposes these networks serve, from brand equity and management in online settings, to customer relationships, and employee attraction.

For more than a decade, marketing academic and practitioners have focused on the intersection between consumer behavior and interactive marketing, offering a wide range of conceptual and empirical research papers, as well as online marketing case studies.

Alalwan et al. emphasize the necessity to study and examine the impact of different social media platforms (i.e. Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn) on the return on investments of marketing expenditure in the form of promotional activities aimed at reaching targeted customers. Social media sites instigate impulse purchases, drive sales from new and recurring customers, and also provide marketing intelligence sources of customers and their attitudes, interests, perceptions and so on.

Especially when online interactions occur between companies and social media users, they provide insights for product marketing. Chandra et al. found that active and regular consumers of social media tended to have a more positive attitude for advertising these platforms, which provided help in buying decisions.

Hudson et al. focused their cross-cultural study on testing and confirming the impact of social media interactions on brand relationship quality and brand anthropomorphism. Their study showed compelling evidence that social media marketing is a differentiating factor for brands in online interactive settings, for a quality relationship with brands. Most notably, the authors concluded that consumers who engage with favorite brands on social media exhibit stronger relationships with those particular brand, compared to consumers who do not interact with their preferred brands on these social platforms. Brand anthropomorphism does not guarantee strong relationships (as opposed to brand relationship quality), however Hudson et al. propose this concept as a 'catalyst facilitating an interpersonal lens to view social media interactions with a brand'.

For branding, social media has an importance role of strategic importance for reminding, informing, and entertaining consumers, in relation to a particular brand. Lovett and Staelin appreciate that 54% of consumer's decision processes (and eventually purchases) are affected by social media communications. Thus, social media is an essential part of marketing strategy in online settings and organizations need allocate the necessary resources to manage their online brand communications, regardless if these discussions come from third-party experts or consumers' perceptions and reviews.

The manuscript reviews recent literature on social media marketing, by exploring the main trends of research and association of this concept with other marketing terms. The rest of the paper is structured to include a review of relevant literature, examining the strategic opportunities of social media marketing for organizations (non-profits organizations or for-profit companies, etc.). Finally, the paper concludes with theoretical and managerial implications, and proposes directions for future research.