Describe about the Literature Review: Social Media for Brand Building.
This literature review paper is based on the topic of the research proposal “Social Media for Brand Building”. The advent of Web 2.0 has developed various new ways in order to communicate, share content and also to collaborate. As per the statistics of the researcher, it has been found that in the year 2009, the social media has became much popular, especially the social networking sites that are also known as SNS in short. The social networking sites that became popular during the year 2009, based on the popular online activity in terms of average amount of time spent, include Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace. At present there are above 150 SNS in the year 2009 and the social media company named Facebook was ranked first in terms of popularity and it has been found that about 206.9 million visitors visit the page of the particular social media across the world. According to a recent study, it has been found that 93% of the users of social media believe that every organization should have a presence in social media. On the other hand, about 85% of the users of social media think that every company should interact with its consumers through SNS [1]. It has been noted that most of the companies have penetrated the online social networking scene and offers direct links from the corporate websites to the social media sites like Twitter and Facebook and also uses these instruments to support the formation of brand communities and to promote the brands. Recent statistics shows that the spending for advertising by the companies on the social media sites like Facebook and MySpace is expected to reach $ 906 million and $ 648 million respectively for the year 2016 [2]. Meanwhile, a significant portion of the total spending is used for maintaining and building a social network presence.
Therefore, the aim of this literature review is to find that both small and large companies can earn more by implementing the social media sites for advertising and promoting the brand and also for brand building.
A. Internet
The internet transforms the environment of the business, creates opportunities and new challenges. At present day, internet acts a primary source of information, communication and entertainment. However, it also acts a carrier for commercial transactions. Therefore, the web explosion takes place as medium of business and marketing is the main use among all. Thus, the internet acts as a critical distribution channel for most of the successful businesses and among all marketing and spreading the brand communication takes place through the sites of social networking [3]. Internet gives the companies a wider amount of opportunity to reach a huge amount of audience and to develop a compelling value propositions that were impossible in prior years. The internet also provides various new instruments for interaction, promotion and building relationship. The internet empowers the customers with various options and information in order to make a fundamental shift in the interaction between the sellers and the buyers. The internet helps to bring in new usability and thus the organizations update continuously in order to follow the existing trend and to make better exploitation opportunities due to availability of new technologies and mobility [4]. The facility of audio and visual multimedia helps the internet to attract the customers for its facility of communication in the world of business and also in everyday life. The internet users in the world can be better understood from the following pie chart:
B. Social Media
The social networks have transformed the communications over the last decade that shifts the way of consumption, production and interaction with the information on the basis of explosive migration. The social media websites have developed huge impetus on the platform of communication with the end customers of various services and products that were lacking in traditional medium. The social networking sites are generally used as the marketing instrument by the marketers that create the brand relationship. The social networking sites are more interactive and collaborative in comparison to the traditional media that are followed by the marketers. Advertising is a customer centric approach. Thus, consumers play a vital role in any type of communication. There are various advantages of social network advertising, and these include – popularization of the brand, informing target customers about the brand, encouraging social advantages for the brand and making the target customers to interact and to keep them intact with the particular brand [5]. Advertising on internet gives a huge contribution to the brand competition in the present market. Advertising not only gives data about a particular service or product but it also helps in promoting innovation. As a result of survey, it has been found that now-a day both big and small companies lay their base on the advertising through social network in order to get recognized in the present competitive market. The social media sites like Facebook, Twitter have become a corporate branding hub across the world. It has been found that every company that exists in the social networking sites has same characteristics and benefits like creation of a page, add multimedia, share resources and many more [6]. Thus, the smaller businesses can also opt for advertising in the social media sites and can build the brand. The following figure shows the type of interaction, which take place within the Social sphere:
The internet has changed the “brandscape” or the environment of the brand [7]. Now a day, new tools and strategies are explored by the company for building the brands of the firm or the business on the internet. This also includes the interactive approach that helps to attract the new consumers of the business and also to build the loyalty of the firm. Building of a strong brand is a complex job and the procedure of building brand starts with the expansion of the strong value proposition. As a strong value proposition has been developed, the next stage is to earn the consumers in order to try the new brand. If the particular company is able to provide properly developed offering, then this should give a satisfactory experience in return to its customers such that the company can arise willingness among the consumers to buy again from the particular brand. In order to entice the trial and to repeat the purchase from the particular company, triggering mechanisms are the necessary one as these are developed through promotion, advertising, public relations, selling and direct marketing. Therefore, an organization is required to communicate the brands’ value and to reinforce the associations of brand in order to start the usage and experience. The mixture of the stimulus of the satisfactory experience and usage and the constant communications along with confidence, brand equity and brand awareness are built. According to the traditional approach, the brands were an alternative for collecting information along with the value addition [8]. It is the way for the consumers to make the process of time consuming of comparison and search easier before deciding to purchase. It can be said that use of internet has make it easier for the consumers to search and compare. However, it can also be said that this internet search and findings can undermine the brands’ value. In addition to this, in case of online shopping, the consumers have to pay online. Thus, during transaction, the customer has to provide his / her all personal details like address, name, number of credit card and many more and commonly people have concerns regarding sharing his personal details. Thus, in case of online shopping, ethics, trust and security play an important role. Therefore, people generally use that particular online site for shopping from where he is used to buy. Therefore, smaller business and especially the newer ones might have to suffer in order to earn customers and to make the people loyal to the particular company. Moreover, internet provides scope to interact the company to its customers on a one to one basis. But the traditional approach used to form a relationship with an unnamed customer. Therefore, the new approach makes the relationship of the company and its consumers much strong and thus helps in expanding the business. The emerging brand building environment can be better understood from the following chart:
There are three ways that helps in successful brand building efforts. This can be better understood from the following figure:
Marketing is defined as the organizational function that sets procedures for communicating, creating and delivering the value to the consumers and also for managing the relationships with the consumers in that particular way, which will provide benefit to both the stockholders and the organization. As per the perspective of the company, the processes that have been mentioned in the definition of the marketing are considered as the brand awareness, public relations, advertising, promotion and many more. However, the researcher puts more importance to the brand building as proper development of brand helps the company to communicate with the customers and thus it helps to earn more new loyal customers. Proper brand building helps the firm to deliver proper values to its customers. Therefore, the internet marketing is the application of the internet on one hand and related digital technologies on the other in order to achieve or gain the objectives of marketing. It has been found that the use of the social media networks acts as the subset of internet application. In other words, it can be said that the social media networking is considered as the instrument for the marketers. This indicates the social media sites like the Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and many more helps in accomplishing the marketing strategies by the application of the internet. Thus, it is an important factor for every marketer to select the most suitable platform for running his business [9]. It has been found that a good marketing goal makes the enable to achieve new consumers and also to retain the existing customers by providing them customer satisfaction. All the companies that are both small and large should use the social media sites in order to build the brand of the particular firm. The online marketing has a surplus amount of strengths and the high speed of the technology helps to access the information by the companies regarding their customers’ nature, likings and behavior. This factor is considered as the most cost effective method for any business. Thus, any business might be small or large should implement this and use the social media platform for running the business successfully. The internet and the social media platform help to conduct the market research survey at lower cost than any other method. Therefore, in other words it can be said that all the marketing researches that are conducted through internet is cost effective. However, the online marketing also faces various troubles. These include – the language difference and the cultural difference might create difficulties during the period of data and information collection about the nature, likings and willingness of the consumers [10]. Secondly, to provide guarantee that the responding person is the particular person whom the marketer thinks are difficult. The implementation of social media has changed the approach of the business to brand building. This can be better understood from the following chart:
The relationship can be developed between the online networking community and the brand based on the networks of social media in order to bring in value to the business. In order to maintain relationship with the accurate and potential customer of the firm and also to attract the quality prospects, it is important for a company to learn when and where the network is efficiently required. With the aim to learn this especially from a business perspective, streaming can be performed by highlighting on the accurate groups along with the accurate services of social networking. This procedure is termed as sales funnel and this is used as a metaphor – it is structured wide at the top and it is narrow towards the bottom, signifying the monitoring of the sales method [11]. The wider top of the funnel indicates that several people of a firm perceive required services and products. Towards the bottom of the funnel, sales of a firm are represented that delivers the services and products to the consumers. The following figure represents the sales funnel that indicates interested people in the ‘Interest Jungle’ are rationalized from various types of social networking sites as per their preferences into the domain of the marketers.
Therefore, from the above concept and diagram it can be said that now a day people more use internet as well as the social media sites. Thus they are aware of any advertising posted in the social media sites and thus people came to know about any new brand, products or services that are provided by a particular company. Therefore, any firm, either big or small should take part in the social media sites in order to promote, advertise and also to build the brand of any product or services, as people in the modern days mainly access the social media sites [12]. So both small or big both the businesses should follow the social media sites for brand building.
Networks mean a set of complex relationships that establish a type of relationship in a business to consumer (B2C) level. Here an interaction takes place between the customers and the online marketer that is generally developed on the most suitable social media platforms. Both the smaller or larger, both the types of firms should opt for online business as it helps the business to develop or to build a brand and the establishment of brand increases the numbers of contacts. In addition to these, online business increases sales of the firm [13]. On the other hand, there might be any reason for a company going online but the value and the role of the network is essentially important in order to detain. There are three laws on value governance that are implemented to the communities and social networks in order to run the business effectively. The name of the laws and their figures are provided below for better understanding of the law and how this is applied to the social media networking for developing a network among the individuals.
A. Sarnoff’s Law:
As per the Sarnoff’s law, the value of the network rises directly with the numbers of listeners on a particular network [14]. Therefore, this theory indicates that more the numbers of people are connected to a particular brand by social network, it will be more effective.
B. Metcalfe’s Law:
The Metcalfe’s law indicates the effect of various networks like – communication technologies, social network, the World Wide Web and internet. As per the law, with the increase in the numbers of users along with the increase in the service, the particular service becomes more valuable to the community.
C. Reed’s Law
As per this law, a large network’s function can raise with the size of the network. According to this law is mostly suitable for social networks and it mainly put emphasizes on the effect of the value of the network by identifying and supporting members of the group.
The knowledge of the consumers of a particular brand cannot be developed presumptuously. However, a particular analytical measure should be structured. The social media metric can be measured by the unique visitors and audience, influence and engagement. The engagement level can be identified by the total numbers of people who actually responded to the brand message. The consumption procedure helps to built strong customer engagement [15]. Secondly, a marketer can check the type of influence on themselves depending on the nature of the audiences i.e. negative, neutral or positive. Dissatisfaction might lead to negative influence; meanwhile satisfaction of the customers might lead to positive influence. Lastly, well recognition of the brand to the audience is also important [16]. Thus, it has been stated that a marketer should communicate with the brand frequently with the aim to develop brand awareness.
The most common challenge that every organization – small or large might face is the monitoring of the activities that are ongoing in the organization. The main aim of this is to control the environment within the particular network [27]. The image and the brand message should not be violated. In such context, the management of a business has to face various challenges along with a broader range of monitoring tools of social media with the aim to safeguard the online reputation. A web based monitoring tool named Crowd ControlHQ can be implemented in order to keep the firm safe by the monitoring activities of the social network [17]. Thus, it has been stated that the usage of the social network instruments make the firm to believe that the social media takes place inevitably in an open and transparent way such that the particular brand also remains protected from any other risks [18]. Therefore, it has been stated that every business – small or large should implement the social media platform to build the brand.
According to the researcher, many bigger and smaller companies have been noted to be benefited by implementing the social media sites [26]. Many companies’ revenue, earnings and profitability have been raised due to the implementation of the social media platform for building brand of the companies. For instance, the company O2 is considered for getting the tone of voice of the customers tricky in order to diffuse a lot of complaints of its customers, especially when outage occurred. The company even tries to manage a negative situation and also try to convert the negative situation into an exercise of brand building by walking a fine line among humor and apology [19]. The social media site Twitter has been used by the company for its business purpose. This include not just the service provided by the company to its customers, but the firm has itself introduced a service called “Tweetserve” that enables the customers of the company to deal with a several issues by the service of direct message of Twitter [25]. In addition to this, by using the “Tweetserve” the customers of the particular firm can also receive the accurate balance of their account that remains with the company during the special minute’s offer [20]. Secondly, the use of the social media sites have also been found in the company Oreo, the American brand that is well-known for its fast response to any current events. The company by using the social media platform tweet with its customer when any issue occurs in order to assure safety to all the products of the particular company [21]. Even when the firm turned 100, it used to post daily various designs of cookie for 100 days. Oreo also increased their engagement in Facebook by about 195% and have increased their rate of share by 280% [28]. For the company Greggs, when the unfortunate logo mix-up occurred, several messages of the company’s customers on the twitter alert the firm about the spoof logo that Google was showing alongside their search list [22]. This helped firm to get rid of this adulteration. Thus Greggs entertained its customers for “tongue-in-cheek” and appropriate responses. On the other hand, for the company Buzzfeed, it uses Pinterest in order to find trending topics, to observe the categorization of the information by the people and to receive various ideas for new stories [23]. It has been found that the referral traffic has been increased to a wider extent since the firm started to use Pinterest. The first post of the firm in the Pinterest brings in about 2.3 million hits and since June 2012, the company has been running successfully [24]. The following graph indicates the reasons for which the other brands are also on social media sites:
The following statistics shows the online demographic that is the percentage and age range of men and women using internet and social media sites:
Conclusion:
Therefore, it can be concluded that this literature review study has motivated the researchers to conduct this particular study. As the social media has became an important tool or instrument for marketing and as it provides various opportunities to the companies to know their customers more and to increase their revenue and profit percentage, it can be said that every organization big or small should put step forward and should use the platform for building brand. Now a day most of the people uses internet and remains connected through social media sites. Thus this media will help a start-up business as well as a smaller company to build brand. The social media also helps to run a business as the satisfied or dissatisfied comments of the customers in the walls of Facebook or the twits in the Twitter guides the firm to run its business successfully and to modify its products and/ or services in need.
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