Social Media Strategy for Online Service Brands Carfagnini, J
From Digital Culture & Society
Social Media Strategy for Online Service Brands
Article: Mills, Adam J. and Kirk Plangger. "Social Media Strategy for Online Service Brands." Service Industries Journal, vol. 35, no. 10, July 2015, pp. 521-536. Amanda Caron.
Contents |
[edit] Context
[edit] Overview
[edit] Strengths and Weaknesses
[edit] Assessment
[edit] Original Document
This article focuses on social media strategies for online service brands. It is important for every brand to realize that social media is the new way of advertising and one of the best ways to interact with potential customers, or people who already use your merchandise. A lot of in person services are changing their ways to become more online. “Some services, like banking and accounting, have generally seen efficient industry-wide movement to the online environment via branded websites, whereas other services like healthcare and law are in a slower process of industry transition” (p.521). Companies have the opportunity to reach an increasing amount of customers if they move their services to an online platform. “More than a third of 18– 44-year-old social media users consciously follow brands and brand pages on social media networks, and this percentage increases to almost three-quarters for users between the ages of 24 and 34 (Edison Research, 2012)” (p. 528). This percentage of the population and age bracket is what companies need to be marketing to and the opportunities with social media are endless.
One of the main aspects that the article focuses on is “two- way communication between brands and customers” (p.522). This communication allows not only for brand-to-customer-to-brand, but also customer-to-customer communication. For example if a company posts a photo onto Instagram a customer is able to comment and have another comment respond or even the company has the ability to reply to their comment. This concept is great because when the inter web was only web 1.0 users were only able to post and have interactions with other users. Also like never before, marketers of service brands are able to speak directly to customers, online and immediately. Social media offers new and unique opportunities brand to customer relationships online. Social media offers challenging and potentially valuable opportunities that were previously unavailable to marketers through offline channels.
The article also goes over some strategic processes, along with diagrams, and step by step processes that can help companies use social media to their best advantage. Along with the great connections social media allows businesses to make with customers it also offers a lot of marketing advantages. Overall the main focus of this article is on why companies should be marketing on social media and not how.
The article outlines the strengths and benefits of marketing on social media. A few benefits consist of customer data collection, marketing communications and a better customer service. Another aspect the article brought forth is that social media is always active. It is best for companies to post during certain days at certain times, but when businesses have a huge following they most likely have followers viewing there post every part of every day. This paper has attempted to illustrate the role social media can play for online service brands not only as a promotional or communicative channel, but also as part of an integrated marketing and customer relationship management strategy that can simultaneously engage and build relationships with customers. The article expresses that with the data companies collect from social media sites they can adjust their tactics to better their statistics. “Unique to social media, versus traditional media, is the ability to adapt and adjust media communications during the process of executing strategy; the ability to respond and to accommodate needs and desires is present in both content and context.” (p.533)
This article does not have many weaknesses. I believe it goes over all of the main points that have to do with the benefits of companies marketing on social media and moving their services to be accessible online. The article though does not go over any of the content that companies should be posting, but rather the pros of using social media and all of the different platforms. It does not touch on what is a good way for services to move to being online.
[edit] Reference
Social media is a place where all users have the equal opportunity to create online communities with people who share common interests. Furthermore they can control who they connect with, giving the users purchasing power as consumers of social media. These groups and connections also help to shape users’ online identities, which reflects their offline presence. Due to this, it is important for brands, companies, and institutions to engage with their followers in a way that adds to their online identity, and creates a relationship between them.
The article by Momoko, Harrigan, and Soutar (2018) discusses how social media could be used for market research. Enabling marketers to create and facilitate an online community for their followers in order for them to have a positive experience. The study focused on the Facebook and Instagram pages of the University of Western Australia. The authors analyzed posts from the institution, as well as the number of likes and comments from their followers in order to understand the type of engagement there is on these pages. This type of community is called a social media brand community (SMBC). To analyze the results, the authors applied social identity theory as the context in order to specifically look at how engagement with a brand on social media affects the online presence of their followers. The results of the study concluded that a variety of different strategies, such as identity narratives encourage followers to engage with the brand through social media and create a close-knit community with both the university and the other followers.
The author of this article introduces social identity theory in order to interpret their results. The author goes into great detail about the different types of social identity, such as affective, evaluative, and cognitive social identities. In addition, the article explains why each element of social identity theory is essential to creating a valuable bond with followers and a positive online community around a brand. The article discusses the differences in content and follower engagement on each page. Through reviewing multiple social media platforms, it gives a more holistic result and understanding of the data for the authors and readers. In addition, looking at two different social media websites shows how different features that are offered by each platform affect the university’s content and how the followers engage with the pages. Finally, the article outlines a variety of different methods that companies and institutions can achieve engagement with their followers. This is important for readers to know as there are many different variables that need to be considered when posting on social media for a brand or institution. Factors such as the type of media used in the post and the type of platform will result in different levels of interaction and reactions from followers, which can lead in different companies implementing different strategies and still achieve the same results.
While this article has many strengths and goes into great detail explaining their theory and results, there are some limitations that pertain to the method of data collection. To begin, the authors of the article chose to focus on the social media pages of a university. While using the school as the “brand”, the goal of the page is to create a community with people who currently attend the university, are recent graduates, or are incoming students. This helps to solidify an online community with the audience; however it does not have the goal of attracting new followers and growing their community through advertising. For future research, it may be interesting to analyze a brand to see how they market themselves in order to gain new followers, while at the same time interacting with their current following. The types of posts made by the university were also filtered for the study to exclude co-authored content by students, such as reposting their pictures on their Instagram page. For the study, it was important to solely analyze posts made fully by the university, but in the future research can include student submitted content in order to see if there is a difference in engagement and interaction between the two different kinds of content. The final limitation found in this study is that the authors used a pure observational approach when collecting data. This means that the article focuses only on information found in the Facebook and Instagram posts, and does not include any opinions from the university’s followers. Extra information found in focus groups, questionnaires, or interviews would help to confirm the results that were found in the observational data.
This article addresses not only the impact of strong engagement between an institution and company on social media, but also describes different strategies of how to achieve high engagement with their followers. Using the social identity theory, the authors found that users follow these social media accounts in order to shape their online presence, and feel like they belong to a community of people with similar interests. Brands that interact with their followers can then create strong relationships with them, which also makes their followers feel included and that they are being heard, which in turn continues the cycle of consumer-brand interaction.
--Dbradley 15:00, 8 February 2019 (EST)
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