دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی استراتژی های ساختار برند رسانه های اجتماعی در شرکت های B2B - امرالد 2016

Introduction

Social media, including social network sites, have become important digital meeting places for friends and acquaintances and are now viewed as significant communication arenas (Harrigan, 2011). Social media support a range of social activities, including blogging, microblogging, photo-sharing, social networking, and videosharing (Centeno et al., 2009). They offer two-way communications, the opportunity for individuals and businesses to capitalise on people’s networks, and a rich digital space for the exchange of electronic word of mouth (eWOM) (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2011). In late 2014, there were 1.35 billion Facebook users, 284 million Twitter users, 1 billionYoutube users, and 332 million LinkedIn users (www.statista.com). Accordingly, businesses and their marketers are increasingly viewing social media as an additional marketing channel through which they can communicate or interact with their customers and prospective customers (Gummerus et al., 2011; Stelzner, 2013). Evidence of successful brand presence in social media (Edelman, 2010; Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010), the size of the potential audience, plus the level of interactivity available in social media channels, drives business interest in social media. Particularly, for business-toconsumer (B2C) firms, research shows that social media have changed the tools and strategies that companies use to communicate, promote their brand and create brand communities (Christdoulides, 2009; Kaplan and Haelein, 2010; Mangold and Faulds, 2009).

5. Conclusion, Limitations and Recommendations

All of the B2B companies in the study were engaged in social media marketing, although the extent of engagement varied, depending partly on how long the companies had been engaged with social media marketing, and partly on senior management commitment and interest. We propose the B2B Social Media Engagement Taxonomy, with three categories, based on the extent to which the social media marketing is embedded in marketing and business strategies: social businesses, social media users, and social experimenters. The taxonomy is useful in benchmarking social media marketing programmes. Whilst, despite their different bases for classification, there are similarities between our taxonomy and the categories proposed by Wilson et al. (2011) for B2C social media strategies, there is no evidence in our study of firms exhibiting the characterisitics of Wilson et al. (2011)’s most engaged category, social media transformers, and it may be that this category is not appropriate for B2B organisations. Nevertheless, it is possible that B2B Social Media Engagement Taxonomy might have transferrability to B2C organisations. Further research to develop taxonomies of social media enagagement would develop a benchmarking framework that would have applications for both researchers and practitioners.